Scuba Geek

Legendary Scuba Diver has a whale of a tale to tell January 30, 2006

Posted by Andy Carroll in : general , trackback

Ray McAllister is an 82 year old retired oceanography professor at Florida Atlantic university. He recently recounted a few of his underwater escapades at a Deerfield Beach dinner honoring him and several other South Florida diving luminaries.

After showing him how to use a tank and regulator, McAllister’s colleagues told him, “‘Don’t hold your breath because it will kill you,’” he recalled with a laugh. “I made it to 90 feet and I was hooked for life.”

The next day he ran out of air 160 feet deep and had to make a free ascent, exhaling the entire way. Undiscouraged, he continued diving and is believed to be the first U.S. civilian dive instructor.

Ray’s most excellent story though, and why I chose to recount his story, is his encounter with a Humback Whale around 1960.

Aboard the Sir Horace Lamb, he saw a humpback whale laying tight against the ship, apparently rubbing her skin. For some reason, he got the idea to jump on the whale’s back and try to ride it standing up alongside the boat.

“I decided to do a ‘look ma — no hands’ on her back,” McAllister wrote in his as-yet unpublished memoirs.

“I leaped onto her back and went down through a fetid, fishy spout as she blew. My left foot went into her left blowhole (there were two set side-by-side in a ‘V’) about six inches beyond the ankle joint. She did what any intelligent beast would do if someone stuck a foot in her nostril: she started to roll away from Sir Horace and dive.”

McAllister barely had enough time to push with his right foot and yank his left foot out of the blowhole, leaving his open-top Air Force boot in her nostril.

After the adrenaline wore off, McAllister realized his left ankle was badly sprained and asked someone to take him to a nearby Air Force hospital. But before he could go, he had to fill out a workman’s compensation form.

“Where it asked how the accident happened, I wrote ‘I jumped on the back of a humpback whale and got my foot caught in her blowhole,’” McAllister recalled. ‘Where it asked what steps were being taken to prevent a recurrence of the accident, I wrote, ‘I won’t jump on any more whales!’”

After one of the base commanders read the form and got through laughing, he made McAllister change it to say that he had jumped onto a dock and next time would use a gangplank. Then McAllister was taken to the hospital.

But the whale tale had an epilogue: a couple of months later, McAllister was perusing a publication called The Norwegian Whaling Gazette when he read about a 35-foot female humpback whale that had been taken off Bermuda with a shoe in her left blowhole.

He ran around the base, showing his colleagues the news item and later was invited to recount the tale at the Kindley Air Force Base Fishing Club. McAllister’s was voted best in a contest of fishing stories, and he was supposed to win a Boston Whaler and fishing tackle. But the commanding officer, who was president of the club, disqualified his entry because “I was not a member of the club and it was a mammal story — not a fish story.”