Incredible Footage Shows Giant Humpback Whale Jumps Out Of Sea Right Beside Boat

A massive humpback whale has been pictured and recorded leaping out of the sea right in front of a tiny fishing boat in Monterey, California.

In the incredible visuals, captured by photographer Douglas Croft and whale watcher Kate Cummings, an unsuspecting fisherman, Baja Sueno, can be seen staring shockingly at one of the water’s largest mammals as it bursts from the waves and narrowly misses his boat.

Croft, who took the photos, said:

“It was quite exciting! Salmon season coincides with the time when humpbacks are returning to Monterey Bay to feed for the summer and there were hundreds of boats on the bay fishing. This whale had breached a couple of times before this and many times they’ll just keep doing it. I went below deck to shoot from a porthole close to the water line. That’s what gives this amazing perspective of looking up at the whale.

“That the breach was directly behind the fishing boat really shows the size. Since the boat is closer, it should look bigger, but the whale is huge! If I’d been the fisherman, I’d probably need some new underwear.”

Cummings, who took the video, added:

“It was fun capturing this video. The whale had already breached multiple times much further away from the fisherman. But sometimes when whales breach multiple times, they’re also heading a specific direction when they’re underwater building momentum for the next breach. I figured the next breach would be around the fisherman because the whale was heading that way and sure enough! Though I didn’t expect the whale and the boat to line up so perfectly.”

Whales are incredibly intelligent creatures. No whale is more famous for its singing than the humpback. All males in a population sing the same song, but those songs change from year to year and vary in different parts of the world.

Last month, we reported an amazing incident in which a beluga whale returned a woman’s iPhone that she had accidentally dropped in the water at Hammerfest Harbour in Norway. Earlier this year, a South African diver and photographer was swallowed and then spit out by a Bryde’s whale while he was photographing a mass of sardines off South Africa’s coast.

Humpback whales, which can weigh up to 30 tons and can reach 50 feet in length and typically migrate up to 25,000 km each year, were granted protected status in the mid-1960s. It is estimated that there are roughly 80,000 humpback whales living in the wild.

The International Whaling Commission banned commercial hunting of humpbacks in 1966, followed by all baleen whales and sperm whales in 1986, a moratorium that still stands today. But despite the moratorium, Japan, Norway and Iceland still hunt whales in large numbers. Last month, we reported how the sea turned red as hundreds of whales were slaughtered on the remote Faroe Islands for their meat.