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"  &amp;quot;Okay,&amp;quot; the Zodiac driver says. &amp;quot;You go first. Swing your feet over the side, hook your elbow into mine, and lower yourself slowly into the water. The cold is going to be a shock. Just try to keep breathing.&amp;quot; I look out over the wind-battered bay. All around, hundreds of beluga whales are feeding, their pale, bulbous heads arcing out of the water and then disappearing again. Try to keep breathing. This is the mouth of the Churchill River, on the western shore of Canada&amp;#039;s Hudson Bay, and the water temperature is about 39 degrees Fahrenheit. Great for beluga whales, but not so great for me, even though I&amp;#039;m in a double-layered 7-mil wetsuit\u2014complete with hood, boots and gloves\u2014that&amp;#039;s twice as thick as the one I wear for winter surfing in California. The driver, Danielle, moves over onto the \u00ADpontoon next to me and hooks my arm. As my two fellow passengers look on, I slide into the icy water. It rushes into my booties and seeps around my legs and torso. I gasp and feel a surge of panic. Keep breathing! Huh\u2014huh\u2014huh\u2026 \u2028 I&amp;#039;m keeping it together. Breathing in, breathing out. I lower my face. The frigid water stings the bare flesh in the inch-wide gap between my hood and my mask. Below me, murky patterns of light shift in a diffuse glow the color of Mountain Dew. I wonder what&amp;#039;s down there, not really wanting to know. A vivid imagination is a terrible curse.  As the rubber raft slowly motors along, I keep a tight grip on the rope attached to it, stretch out my legs and float spread-eagle. Each time I shift position, a rivulet of cold water seeps into my armpit or along my back. I peer down into the yellow glow through the tunnel of my mask and wait. Well, I think, this is unusual.  Some ideas just sound so ridiculous that they have to be great. I first heard about rope-snorkeling with beluga\u00AD whales six years ago, when I was on a polar-bear-watching trip in Churchill, a town in the western province of Manitoba. &amp;quot;They take you out in a boat, tie a rope around you and lower you into the water with a pod of whales,&amp;quot; someone told me. The description wasn&amp;#039;t quite accurate\u2014you hang on to the rope\u2014but what did I know? My curiosity was piqued. Churchill (pop. 931) sits in a vast expanse of the subarctic, roughly 1000 miles north of Minneapolis. The town is most famous for its dense concentration of polar bears that show up every fall and wait by the shore for ice to form so they can hunt seals. And every summer thousands of beluga whales congregate at the mouth of the Churchill River to feed on schools of capelin, a small, oily fish.  Beluga are one of the stranger \u00ADmembers of the whale family, with a prominent lump\u2014called a melon\u2014on the front of their heads. Between 12 and 14 feet long and weighing about 2000 pounds, beluga are roughly twice the size of bottlenose dolphins, and they have a dorsal ridge rather than a fin. The world population of 60,000 to 80,000 roam across northern waters, where they can live up to 60 years, unless eaten by their main predators, polar bears and killer whales. The Inuit are allowed to hunt them, and do. The week before my visit, hunters hauled a beluga ashore at a nearby community.  About 25 years ago, some hardy tourists on a whale-watching boat asked if they could put on wetsuits and go snorkeling with the whales. Sure, why not? In heavily trafficked areas of the world, encouraging customers to get in the water with whales and dolphins could change the animals&amp;#039; behavior, but in Churchill, there aren&amp;#039;t enough visitors to have a huge impact. &amp;quot;If it&amp;#039;s done occasionally, and it&amp;#039;s not with the same animals over and over, it&amp;#039;s not much of a concern,&amp;quot; says whale biologist Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. As it turns out, beluga are highly intelligent and curious creatures that gather to gambol around swimmers. Usually. On the day I take my dip, the whales have better things to do. I can hear them spouting, and when I lift my head I see their noggins cresting all around me. Underwater, however, the visibility is terrible, thanks to sediment stirred up by a recent storm. All I see are shifting patterns of light and dark. Then, out of the depths, a circle of bubbles rushes up toward me. My snorkel fills with salt water as I sputter and gasp and instinctively press myself against the hull of the Zodiac. A minute later, the white shape of a whale glides 10 feet below me. Then another appears, this time following alongside me, keeping pace with a sinuous rhythm of its long body. Again I press myself against the \u00ADrubber hull. Though the beluga seem benign and peaceable, there is also something ineffably creepy about the way their ghostly forms materialize out of the murk. For the next 10 minutes, the whales emerge and disappear; then they&amp;#039;re gone for good. I clamber back aboard, nearly frozen and shaking like a wet dog. As we motor to shore, Danielle lowers a hydrophone into the water. Through a small speaker emerges the symphonic cacophony I couldn&amp;#039;t hear when I was in the water: a rain-forest chatter of squeaks, clicks and trills. &amp;quot;Sailors used to call beluga sea canaries,&amp;quot; Danielle says. &amp;quot;To me, they sound more like R2-D2.&amp;quot; The morning dawns a cloudy 50 F, nothing to put you in the mood for a swim, but again I squeeze into a wetsuit and climb aboard the Zodiac. The water is choppier than before, dotted with whitecaps, and there seem to be fewer whales around. But eventually a pair hovers behind us, a mother and her calf, and I slip over the side. The underwater visibility is much better. Small jellyfish drift past. And then, almost immediately, a beluga swims by, half-turning to regard me with a small, dark eye. Then a pair comes up behind me. And a group of three appears below, their bellies turned up as they float away. For the next hour, the curious whales are my constant companions, gliding past, below and to the side, behind and in front, solo and in pairs, or in groups of three or four. The water is clear enough that I can make out every detail, from their bulbous heads to the double curve of their grinning mouths to the long scratches on their elongated bodies. They don&amp;#039;t seem ghostlike now, but vividly real. Alone among all whale species, beluga can tilt and nod their heads, and as they pass they turn their faces to me with grins that seem to say, &amp;quot;Man, you are a freaky-looking whatever-it-is.&amp;quot; The water is giving me an ice-cream headache, but I don&amp;#039;t mind now that there&amp;#039;s so much to see. Gradually, my fingers begin to throb and ache from the cold. Though I&amp;#039;m shaking, I try to remain as still as possible to keep water from seeping into my suit. From time to time I can faintly hear the whales&amp;#039; clicks and whistles. The fact that I&amp;#039;m chilled to the core does \u00ADnothing to diminish the unworldly euphoria of the moment. I can&amp;#039;t stay much longer; this cold bay is not my world. But I&amp;#039;ll hang on as long as I can, floating in the greenish glow, waiting for more of these strange creatures to make their way past.  Jeff Wise is the author of Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger. For a daily does of fear, and how it pertains to our everyday life, go to Wise&amp;#039;s blog, here. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/sports/a6538/swimming-with-beluga-whales/>