With Captain Dave’s Whale & Dolphin Watching Safari, we usually get access to some pretty amazing videos, but this one may take the cake – or at least the hand.
The video shows a gray whale that decided it liked to be pet by people. According to Captain Dave Anderson, this whale spent an hour with the folks on the boat, basking in their adoration, letting them touch his mouth and seemingly giving a kiss to a little girl toward the end of the footage.
Anderson said he captured the video while on a family vacation in Magdalena Bay, Baja California. He used a camera attached to a broom handle to film it.
“These gray whales come over here just to be petted. No one feeds them or does anything to entice them. They simply come over for the physical contact,” Anderson said.
Gray whales pass by Dana Point as they travel from the Chukchi Sea near Alaska to the lagoons in Baja, where this was filmed, and back every year, Anderson said. They have one of the longest and most dangerous migrations of any mammal in the world.
They have to watch out for killer whales which kill up to 35 percent of their calves, aboriginal hunters in Russia which are allowed to kill up to 140 a year, and must avoid ships and getting entangled in fishing gear which kills nearly 1,000 dolphins and whales a day (308,000 a year) worldwide, Anderson said.
