Nov. 19 (UPI) — A group of amateur whale watchers off the coast of Washington’s Camano Island captured video when a seal jumped onto their boat to escape a pod of killer whales.
Photographer Charvet Drucker captured video of the encounter Nov. 2 when she and her friends spotted the pod of orcas in the Saratoga Passage.
“We were out on the boat watching some orcas, about 300-400 yards away from them when the hunt began,” Drucker wrote on Facebook.
The group noticed the killer whales were engaging in predation behavior with a seal.
Smith Siromaskul, another member of the whale watching party, said on Facebook that the “pod had been using him as hunting practice and he’d been batted up out of the water more than once.”
The group shut off the boat’s engine in case the animals came closer, and just over a half hour later the seal came even closer than expected — it jumped onto the boat.
The whale watchers said the orcas circled the boat in search of the seal, but gave up and left after about 15 minutes.
The group eventually restarted the boat’s engine and headed back toward shore, with its semi-aquatic passenger still on deck.
“Once we got closer to shore, the seal decided it felt safe enough to leave the boat and jumped off on its own accord,” Drucker wrote.