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Dale Frink has been snapping photos of marine life for quite some time, but on Wednesday, he got his closest shot when a blue whale overturned his boat 12 miles off the shore of San Diego.
He was in a boat with another veteran whale watcher around noon when they captured footage on a GoPro camera of the wild moment when they came face to face with not one, but two whales, according to Grind TV. In the clip, you can see Frink flipping out and hear another scream as the boat flips over, sending the pair into the waters. Frink, who was able to save his camera, managed to take a photo of the blue whale with its mouth wide open before they went down.
The whale had no intention of harming the passengers (who both weren't injured aside from a few scrapes and bruises), but merely had its mouth agape to feed on krill (similar to shrimp) on the surface of the water. It's the start of blue whale season in SoCal, and blue whales mostly eat krill. Frink told Grind TV that it was a second whale (not the one in the photo) that had flipped the boat over when it bumped it while trying to feed alongside of the first whale captured in the photo.
On Frink's website, he wrote about how they got in contact with the blue whale:
We went back over to the Blue Whales because it appeared as if more showed up, after some more observation, we noticed the whales begin to lunge feed at the surface. 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. 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. I cannot stress enough that the Captain was doing her best NOT to get too close to these animals, and that she did her best to follow proper procedure. It was a freak accident that is very rare for whale watching boats. I have heard of similar incidents in other parts of the world, but not with Blue Whales.
