A blue whale surfaced unexpectedly close to a boat Wednesday, capsizing the vessel and dumping the two people on it into the ocean off the San Diego coast.
Photographer Dale Frink managed to snap a photo of the wide and huge mouth of the blue whale appearing over the boat’s side right before the boat tipped.
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On his website, Frink put up an account of what happened, stressing that he and boat captain Cici Sayer are experienced whale watchers and accidentally got too close when the whales changed position.
“Although the Captain was trying to follow from behind and off to the side (approximately the whale's 7 o'clock position) the whale took a sharp right turn in front of us,” Frink wrote. “Suddenly we did not know where the whale was, it could have been anywhere. Per proper whale watching etiquette the Captain stopped the boat to wait for the whale to come up before moving away from the animal.”
Instead, Frink said, the whales surfaced right behind the boat, “mouths completely open in the middle of another lunge feed,” he said.
“We had little time to react. At the time I had two GoPro Cameras mounted pointing directly in front of the boat, one of them caught me turning to see the whale and snap a photo of the first whale making contact with the boat. The second blue whale of the pair then came up even closer and bumped the boat again, giving it the last bit of inertia it needed to go completely overboard,” he said.
Frink’s video shows the slow overturn of the boat, with the horizon rotating in the video. On his website, he said he and the captain were picked up by a nearby vessel that was also whale watching.
“Nobody in their right mind would want something like this to happen, I have been a very strong advocate of proper boating around whales, and even though I was not operating the vessel at the time I feel terrible that it did occur,” he wrote. “This is NOT how I wanted to make national headlines with a photo.”
San Diego, California News Station - KFMB Channel 8 - cbs8.com
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