I QUIT TEACHING TO BECOME A WHALE WHISPERER!

Lisa Skelton tried to do the sensible thing, but the call of the wild was too strong!

- Michelle Meehan

When she finished high school, Lisa Skelton went to university to study music and teaching, but just 18 months after hitting the classroom she chucked in her teaching career to follow her dream of becoming a whale whisperer, taking a job as a deckhand to study the magnificent animals.

“I bought the plane ticket the first year thinking I’ll go, get this out of my system and I’ll settle into teaching, but the first time I saw the killer whale surface, in that moment I knew there was no going back – I wasn’t going to get over it,” she says.

Lisa, 32, says she just swapped the classroom for a different teaching environment when she took a job with a whale and dolphin watching cruise company in Port Stephens, NSW.

“When I finished high school, teaching seemed like a sensible career choice in terms of taking something you love and being able to make a steady income out of it, so I did the degree and was teaching for 18 months,” she says. “But I was going out on the boats in my downtime, doing a bit of weekend and holiday work. I’d been going to the United States every year for a while as well, and part of that was driven by wanting to see killer whales in the wild.”