Doug Emery is used to seeing whales. He and his wife encounter them regularly on the charter boat they operate out of Prince Rupert, B.C.
“The last strip, we saw 30 or 40,” Emery said. “But we’ve never had one stop and actually demonstrate curiosity.”
Never, that is, until the humpback whale they encountered and took incredible video of last month.
Emery and a group of guests were on a fishing trip in Chatham Sound when they noticed a humpback whale sleeping on the surface. Emery turned off the engine, allowing the boat to drift by the whale and the guests to get a closer look.
As the boat got closer, the whale woke up. But rather than swimming away - as the whales Emery encounters often do - it swam toward the boat.
“That was a little unusual,” Emery said. “They usually wake up and swim off.”
So Emery and his passengers left the boat shut down and started to watch the 13-metre animal in the water.
“It was just amazing because the whale came right to the boat and remained with us for about an hour and it was obviously interested in us,” he said. “It was doing the people watching not us the whale watching.”
The humpback came within inches of the boat on several occasions, but it never touched the hull.
“It’s amazing how graceful these animals are,” Emery said. “We would’ve felt the tremor in the hull because it probably weighed 40 tons -- maybe 35 tons -- but the whale never touched our boat.”
The whale lingered with the boat for roughly an hour, but the memory it left the boat’s passengers will last much longer.
“There are no captive humpback whales, so to have one that close where you can observe it and look at it is truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Emery said.
