Whale jumping on boat

Well, this is interesting.. A whale which was showing off its moves in Table Bay, jumped up out of the water “Free Willy” style, and what happens? The whale lands on top of a sailboat.

The whale flattened the steel mass and brought down the rigging before gallantly sliding back into the water and swimming on its way.“It was quite scary,” commented Paloma Werner, who had previously been enjoying the trip with her boyfriend come business partner, Ralph Mothes.“We thought the whale was going to go under the boat and come up on the other side. We thought it would see us.” Ms. Werner continued.However, this was not the case, as the boat had its engine turned off.

The manager/scientist of the Cape Town Mammal Research Institute at the University of Pretoria, Meredith Thornton, shed some light onto the subject for us: “Whales don’t see much by way of their eyes but by sound in the water.”

Given that the whale had such poor eyesight, and that the water was particularly rough, Thornton commented that the whale, presumably a young whale most likely did not even realize the boat was in the way.The hapless couple first spied the whale when it was a stone’s throw away, from their yacht. It jumped out of the water once, and before they could make a move, the whale was only a hair lengths away from the vessel.“There was hardly any wind, so we couldn’t get out of the way,” countered Werner. “We didn’t have time to take any evasive action.”

This just goes to show you, when you are out gallivanting around, always keep your engines running.