By the end of the summer, Diane and Ken were deeply in love and plotting their next move together.
Diane wanted to take him home with her for Christmas in the Bahamas, but Ken was leery of meeting her parents. What would they think of their daughter showing up with a middle-aged American trailing three scuttled marriages, an itinerant whale-chaser with no fixed address and no visible means of support? To his shock and delight, they embraced him as one of the family. So did Diane’s five siblings.
That winter, after Ken resigned from the
Regina Maris
, he and Diane toured the Bahamas in an inflatable Zodiac, camping on the beach or sleeping in the boat. They interviewed fishermen about local marine mammals and distributed sighting report flyers across the smaller cays. When they heard reports of “weird-looking dolphins with horns growing out of their heads,” Ken figured they must be referring to the stalked barnacles on Blainville’s beaked whales. Diane was well schooled in the local marine wildlife. She knew all about the dolphins and the sailfish and every creature on the reef. But she’ d never seen or even heard of beaked whales in the Bahamas. The afternoon they had a three-hour encounter near Abaco with a group of Blainville’s whales that circled their boat, they knew they had found their research home.
Diane conching during a camping trip to Schooner Cay, Bahamas, February 1991.
Beaked whales aren’t the most charismatic of marine mammals. They’re not nearly as sleek and beautiful as the black-on-white orcas. They can’t compete with the spectacle of a breaching humpback or a spyhopping gray whale. In truth, beaked whales do look a lot like “weird-looking dolphins,” on the rare occasions when they show themselves. But for marine mammal researchers in 1990, beaked whales were a virtual tabula rasa. Other than the large Baird’s species of the North Pacific, beaked whales were too small and elusive to interest whalers, so no one had ever bothered researching their behavior. The academic study of beaked whales was essentially a “dead” science, based on skeletal remains reconstructed by museum-based paleontologists and a few obsessive beachcombers such as Balcomb. Only one population of Atlantic beaked whales had ever been studied systematically—the northern bottlenose whales of Nova Scotia. 1 No one had ever surveyed the beaked whales in the Bahamas.
Ken and Diane launched the Bahamas Marine Mammal Survey in 1991. Even for most field researchers, it would have been tedious work: waiting and watching the water’s surface for hours at a time, holding camera and field notes at the ready for a fleeting glimpse of a dorsal fin or fluke. But for Ken and Diane, it was a custom fit. They shared the requisite combination of patience, keen observational skills, and a bottomless appreciation for the exquisite ecology of the Bahamas. And they never tired of each other’s quiet company on the water. It’s not an accident that so many marine mammal field researchers are husband-wife teams, and often childless. Ken and Diane became a hand-in-glove research couple, and the beaked whales became the object of their passionate, tireless attention. Over time, Ken and Diane learned subtle ways to enter the whales’ domain without scaring them off. By trailing along behind the boat with a mask and snorkel, Diane could spot the whales as they prepared to surface. Meanwhile, Ken built customized underwater microphones to gather audio cues of the whales’ movements.
In 1994 Ken proposed to Diane. They were married that summer on the beach in Snug Harbor on San Juan Island, and again for good measure in the Bahamas that fall.
Diane and Ken in Lichtenstein for her sister’s wedding, 1993.
By the winter of 2000, ten years into their survey, Ken and Diane had catalogued and studied the entire population of marine mammals in the northern Bahamas, including 150 Blainville’s, Cuvier’s, and Gervais’ beaked
Diane wanted to take him home with her for Christmas in the Bahamas, but Ken was leery of meeting her parents. What would they think of their daughter showing up with a middle-aged American trailing three scuttled marriages, an itinerant whale-chaser with no fixed address and no visible means of support? To his shock and delight, they embraced him as one of the family. So did Diane’s five siblings.
That winter, after Ken resigned from the
Regina Maris
, he and Diane toured the Bahamas in an inflatable Zodiac, camping on the beach or sleeping in the boat. They interviewed fishermen about local marine mammals and distributed sighting report flyers across the smaller cays. When they heard reports of “weird-looking dolphins with horns growing out of their heads,” Ken figured they must be referring to the stalked barnacles on Blainville’s beaked whales. Diane was well schooled in the local marine wildlife. She knew all about the dolphins and the sailfish and every creature on the reef. But she’ d never seen or even heard of beaked whales in the Bahamas. The afternoon they had a three-hour encounter near Abaco with a group of Blainville’s whales that circled their boat, they knew they had found their research home.
Diane conching during a camping trip to Schooner Cay, Bahamas, February 1991.
Beaked whales aren’t the most charismatic of marine mammals. They’re not nearly as sleek and beautiful as the black-on-white orcas. They can’t compete with the spectacle of a breaching humpback or a spyhopping gray whale. In truth, beaked whales do look a lot like “weird-looking dolphins,” on the rare occasions when they show themselves. But for marine mammal researchers in 1990, beaked whales were a virtual tabula rasa. Other than the large Baird’s species of the North Pacific, beaked whales were too small and elusive to interest whalers, so no one had ever bothered researching their behavior. The academic study of beaked whales was essentially a “dead” science, based on skeletal remains reconstructed by museum-based paleontologists and a few obsessive beachcombers such as Balcomb. Only one population of Atlantic beaked whales had ever been studied systematically—the northern bottlenose whales of Nova Scotia. 1 No one had ever surveyed the beaked whales in the Bahamas.
Ken and Diane launched the Bahamas Marine Mammal Survey in 1991. Even for most field researchers, it would have been tedious work: waiting and watching the water’s surface for hours at a time, holding camera and field notes at the ready for a fleeting glimpse of a dorsal fin or fluke. But for Ken and Diane, it was a custom fit. They shared the requisite combination of patience, keen observational skills, and a bottomless appreciation for the exquisite ecology of the Bahamas. And they never tired of each other’s quiet company on the water. It’s not an accident that so many marine mammal field researchers are husband-wife teams, and often childless. Ken and Diane became a hand-in-glove research couple, and the beaked whales became the object of their passionate, tireless attention. Over time, Ken and Diane learned subtle ways to enter the whales’ domain without scaring them off. By trailing along behind the boat with a mask and snorkel, Diane could spot the whales as they prepared to surface. Meanwhile, Ken built customized underwater microphones to gather audio cues of the whales’ movements.
In 1994 Ken proposed to Diane. They were married that summer on the beach in Snug Harbor on San Juan Island, and again for good measure in the Bahamas that fall.
Diane and Ken in Lichtenstein for her sister’s wedding, 1993.
By the winter of 2000, ten years into their survey, Ken and Diane had catalogued and studied the entire population of marine mammals in the northern Bahamas, including 150 Blainville’s, Cuvier’s, and Gervais’ beaked
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