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Humpbacks do not have sonar

:mad: This is why there are (and should be, in areas that there may not be) rules about how close boats can get to whales.

Here's another video news report that mentions people witnessed the whales feeding in the area; my assumption - and I could be wrong - but based on the number of boats in the vicinity, it appears as though the boaters congregated to where the whales were located. If I am wrong and it was literally a freak accident, then I'm glad no one was hurt (well I suppose I'm glad either way, but more glad that this video reports the whale appeared unharmed):

 
I've been paddling in the Bay of Fundy when humbacks appeared. Boaters seemed to try to get a close as possible to where the whales were ,idiots.
 
A whale breaching on a boat seems to happen somewhere in the world about once every year or two. Given the amount of whale watching that goes on worldwide, this seems to be very small odds of happening - e.g. a freak accident - so not something I would agree with changing rules for.

I have been around whales on boats or kayaks literally hundreds of times, and the vast majority of the time the whales seem well aware of where the boats are. The exception to this would be the breach, as to do this they are often coming from the deep at speed so they can get their bodies airborne, so starting out of visual range of boats.

There was one time of a whale breaching on to a kayak. Interestingly enough, one of the folks in the kayak was a BBC documentarian, who made a show out of it. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002fsh. Worth watching if you can find it.

That all said, this situation was a lot of boats in a small area, which definitely made it more challenging for the whale to avoid them. I have not seen any crowd situations like that before here on the west coast.
 
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