time passes very slowly when you're in a whale's mouth

November 6, 2020 11:17 AM

'It was crazy,' says California kayaker who was engulfed in a whale's mouth Julie McSorley says she has learned her lesson about getting too close to feeding humpbacks [CBC]
posted by readinghippo (21 comments total)

Oh WOW! That was a crazy video. Her friend is never going to trust her to plan activities again!
posted by EllaEm at 11:25 AM on November 6, 2020 [13 favorites]

Damn, that's intense! I hope the whale wasn't harmed at all by the oar or the boat in its mouth. Hopefully it will mean the kayakers keep a bit more of a distance in general with these big wild animals.
posted by fight or flight at 11:59 AM on November 6, 2020 [17 favorites]

Big ole damn pile of nooooope!
posted by drewbage1847 at 12:06 PM on November 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

Knowing they were both OK transformed a video which would have been extremely disturbing/unwatchable to devastatingly funny to me.

According to a radio program I was listening to just before I saw this post, one of the kayakers live-streamed it, and the audio is very frightening.
posted by jamjam at 12:16 PM on November 6, 2020 [6 favorites]

Bill Engvall on whale watching: That's a 60 foot animal. We're a 6 foot rubber boat. We're a bath toy.

posted by Mitheral at 12:31 PM on November 6, 2020 [4 favorites]

I'm honestly kind of glad that animals are seriously getting tired of humans' shit and are increasingly doing something about it.

Fuck yeah make tourist dinguses think twice!

Humans! Stay home, stay safe! Nature is tired of your shit!
posted by deadaluspark at 12:51 PM on November 6, 2020 [9 favorites]

I think this is illegal? Unless a kayak is defined as other than a vessel. You are supposed to give them 100 yards.

When I was a kid, my family had a small wooden dory rigged for sail, and we kept her on Passamaquoddy Bay (near Campobello, people know that island because it's where one of the Roosevelt presidents summered). Once when we were sailing in fog, a whale surfaced nearby - I think it was a minke whale, not too large as they go - it was profoundly awful, in that old sense of awesome. Beautiful and terrible. Suddenly to be aware of the fragile skin of wood between you and the things that live in salt water. The quiet of a foggy morning where the silver water meets the silver air, and between is only what you can see about 10 yards around the boat (I couldn't see the masthead.) The long, long, quiet fin passing close, and the small "phoo" of the blow.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 12:51 PM on November 6, 2020 [31 favorites]

I think this is illegal? Unless a kayak is defined as other than a vessel. You are supposed to give them 100 yards.

Yes a kayak is a vessel but also humpback whales move fast underwater and are hard to see. They probably should have moved away from the school of fish but it's not illegal to let a whale approach as long as you stay still.
posted by muddgirl at 1:00 PM on November 6, 2020

You have to stay out of the path of humpbacks in Hawaii and Alaska but not California. You also have to stay out of the path of resident orcas in Puget Sound (and Canada).
posted by Mitheral at 1:09 PM on November 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

My "favorite" part about this story is how this woman likely traumatized the hell out of her poor friend who was terrified of the one crazy thing that actually happened to them. I get consensually easing people out of their shells, but this was not that.
posted by mykescipark at 1:09 PM on November 6, 2020 [10 favorites]

Here's my close encounter story: On a whale watching trip a few years ago a humpback whale mama and her calf were spotted. Our boat stopped 300 feet away, perpendicular to their path, and turned off the motor to watch them. After a few minutes they dove down and we waited for maybe 10 minutes for them to resurface. Just as the boat operator was about to move on, both the whale and her calf surfaced not 15 feet from the side of the boat. It was startling and scary and pretty awesome. I guess moral of this story even the trained whale spotter had no clue they'd come up that close.
posted by muddgirl at 1:12 PM on November 6, 2020 [4 favorites]

When I say perpendicular I mean like a t-intersection, not in their path. But unsurprisingly whales can change direction underwater.
posted by muddgirl at 1:15 PM on November 6, 2020 [3 favorites]

"I'll definitely kayak in the ocean by dolphins and otters and seals and all the others," she said. "But I think the whales need their space."

Maybe the stuff that can't engulf you need their space too?

We see this sort of behaviour with bears all the time. I've seen people drive up and stop within 3 metres of a bear eating on the side of the road. And then roll down their windows just be sure that if that bear wants to slap you around he won't be impeded in the slightest from ripping your face off. It's totally amazing animals don't deliver comeuppances more often.
posted by Mitheral at 1:20 PM on November 6, 2020 [15 favorites]

I love that the CBC went with the phonetic (?) spelling of Atascadero instead of checking with any of their local sources or even, apparently, Googling the name of the town.
posted by Joey Buttafoucault at 2:59 PM on November 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

It's "funny" that this exactly situation is one of my daughter's major fears, one of the reasons she complains like mad if we go kayaking (which has been twice in her whole life) and now she has finally been vindicated.

We did go kayak whale watching in a Newfoundland inlet and we saw whales from afar and it was great.
posted by GuyZero at 4:01 PM on November 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

"Her reaction was, 'No, I don't like the ocean. I'm scared of sharks. I'm scared of anything I can't see in the water.' And I so ignorantly told her, 'Oh, they're never going to dump you over. The kayaks are very stable. I've never had an issue,'" McSorley said.

"And so she reluctantly came with me just to have a new experience."
posted by doctornemo at 4:17 PM on November 6, 2020 [4 favorites]

Here is a page with a video made by one of the kayakers, which isn't very scary, and down on the page another video with different perspectives from two other videoers.
posted by jamjam at 4:57 PM on November 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

One interesting thing about the kayaker's video is that you can see very clearly why the whole thing happened: just before the whale appears there's a boiling sound as thousands of small silvery fish break surface right around the kayak.

The whale must have been pursuing an entire school of fish, and they tried to get away by swimming up around an object floating on the surface -- pretty good strategy really, and could have evolved to take advantage of floating logs, which must have been common over evolutionary time.

But the whale might have been deploying a counterstrategy: using its enormous strength to nudge the floating object aside and gulp the fish down anyway.
posted by jamjam at 7:58 PM on November 6, 2020 [5 favorites]

But what about this story linked in the article

'We all make mistakes,' says woman who got bit by an octopus she put on her face
posted by medusa at 5:37 AM on November 7, 2020 [7 favorites]

Julie McSorley says she has learned her lesson about getting too close to feeding humpbacks

Yes, but has she learned her lesson about running away when God told her to preach to the Ninevites?
posted by jackbishop at 5:46 AM on November 7, 2020 [9 favorites]

I don't think this was an agressive act on the whales part. I think it was an "oops! What the hell did I just almost eat! Yuck!". Like if you were eating choc chip ice cream and suddenly realized one of the chips was maybe a fly.
posted by WalkerWestridge at 2:36 PM on November 7, 2020 [3 favorites]