Boyd Matson | Wild Chronicles

Taylor and I are in Puerto Plata, Domenican Republic trying to acclimatize to the ocean.  We’ve started slowly just watching it from the beach bar at our hotel.  Tomorrow we begin the real emersion when we head out to the Silver Banks to spend a week following and hopefully swimming with humpback whales.  I was here about 15 years ago with a National Geographic crew but we had a couple problems I would prefer to avoid this time around.  First the underwater housing on our expensive Betacam leaked and flooded the camera.  We had to borrow a home video outfit from a tourist to finish the shoot.  The video was less than stellar.  The second problem occurred when a 40 ton male humpback whale rolled over and approached me in the mating position.  I thought an all black wetsuit was supposed to make you look slimmer.