A seal being chased by a pod of hungry orcas made a desperate decision that saved its life, with a group of boaters becoming its lifeline.
Charvet Drucker captured video of the encounter while boating with two friends off Camano Island in Washington’s Puget Sound earlier this month.
“We were out on the boat watching some orcas, about 300-400 yards away from them when the hunt began, when we noticed the seal they were chasing heading straight at us,” Drucker wrote in a Facebook post. “At that point, we shut the boat off completely to wait to see where they all decided to go.”
As seen in Drucker’s Instagram video, the seal made the only logical choice it had to escape the orcas. It jumped onto the boat, leaving the orcas circling in hopes of relocating the seal. But after about 15 minutes, the orcas gave up and departed the scene.
“Once the orcas left, we turned on the boat and slowly made our way closer to shore, with the seal aboard, to get it to a safer location,” Drucker wrote. “Once we got closer to shore, the seal decided it felt safe enough to leave the boat and jumped off on its own accord.”
Making for a happy ending. At least for the seal.