Nan Hauser

And this just shows that it really required self-regulation in this situation.

And that requires inhibition to focus without being distracted.

That requires sustained attention.

So it wasn't complete chaos.

It wasn't random movement.

It was deliberate.

What the whale was doing was deliberate.

The scientific debate is whether the behavior is instinctual predator disruption or something closer to what we humans call altruism.

So zipped up to the harbor, got there in about 15 minutes, and I saw in the distance a whale dive.

And of course, we identified them with their tail flukes.

There were two notches, a notch on each side of his tail fluke that looked kind of familiar.

All of a sudden he surfaced and he ignored everyone else on my boat.

And he brought his head up right next to me and looked at me, just looked at me.

And I recognized a scar on his head and I screamed, it's him.

It's him.

He's back.

I mean, it may have been one of the most exciting moments of my life to stand there and scream, he's back.

He very sweetly put his huge pectoral fin out and he put it underneath me and I just laid at the surface of the water on his pectoral fin.

And there were tears in my mask.

I mean, this was really emotional.