'At the mercy of this whale': B.C. couple had dinghy lifted by humpback during hours-long encounter

A Vancouver couple was in awe and a bit scared during an hours-long encounter with a whale on B.C.'s Central Coast.

Evan Lee-Dodek and Sofia Carroll said they were fishing in Toba Inlet Friday when they saw a humpback whale.

The whale was about 100 metres away, they told CTV News in an interview Monday, but they still turned off the engine of their dinghy to avoid disturbing the giant.

The whale headed their way, they said, swimming under their dinghy and sticking close by for about two hours.

They were scared but couldn't leave, because they didn't want to put the motor down when the whale was so close.

At one point, the whale actually lifted their boat and swam with it. While they were amazed, they were also worried the humpback might puncture the boat's hull.

"Once it also got used to us, it started slapping the boat around and being more playful, and that's kind of when it got more scary," Carroll said, describing the "rollercoaster of emotions" they went through during those hours.

"What was more nerve-wracking was when it would slap the boat with its fins. We're in a dingy. It's inflated around the outside and (the whale has) these huge barnacles on its fins and it's hitting the boat. I was pretty stressed out," Lee-Dodek said.

"Here we are so far away from anything in a really deep fjord, so vulnerable, just at the mercy of this whale."

The whale did do some damage, albeit minor, to the underside of the boat.

The couple said it was a small price to pay for the experience.

Humpback whales have been making a comeback in recent years in B.C. waters after being hunted to near-extinction in the early 1900s.

According to Jackie Hildering, the whales in the video are known to the Marine Education & Research Society.

“There are two humpback whales shown in this encounter: KC, who I nicknamed when he was a first year with his mother, Houdini, in 2002, and Eros, who is a whale newly documented this year," Hildering said in an email to CTV News. "Eros is the whale who is closest to the boat.”

MERS describes the behaviour seen in the video, and the possible reasoning for it, in a blog post on its website from 2018. The post also explains concerns related to human behaviour in these situations.

The group reminded the public that touching a whale is an illegal act under the federal Marine Mammal Regulation, and said that its hope is the video doesn't encourage others to try to do the same thing. 

Fisheries and Oceans Canada outlines laws and regulations on its website, and offers guidance for what to do to avoid disturbing marine mammals.

With an interview from CTV News Vancouver's Cameron Mitchell