January 12th, 2005

Filed under:
Flora and Fauna
14 Comments »

Whales are Big

This the most terrifying bit of Internet video I’ve seen in weeks. It involves three kayakers and when particularly large killer whale. I’ve looked at it several times, and I’m pretty sure it’s not faked. If it is, it’s a pretty darned good one:

I imagine that’s Japanese being spoken on the video. Can anybody translate?

My wife actually has recurring nightmates about this very thing. Now that she’s seen this, I’d say any future kayaking trips will be solo affairs.

UPDATE: As Travis reports, this footage is faked.

Comments: 14 Responses so far

Travis
January 12th, 2005
11:52 pm

Snopes says it’s false. But I was impressed, too.

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Jeff
January 13th, 2005
6:59 am

Good news in that you may still have a kayaking partner!

Where do you go kayaking? I’m assuming the Georgia Strait - but I really wouldn’t know if that’s safe or not.

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Rob Barac
January 13th, 2005
7:32 am

Yes it is a fake. Very well done though.

I used to work in a production house in Sydney with a lot of 3D and post prod peeps and they scrutinised the video footage for days, well minutes really, and declared it a nice bit of work.

The language, thanks to Mayumi of the the same employer, she indicated that it is indeed Japanaese.

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Marc Vandersluys
January 13th, 2005
7:49 am

How can one possibly determine the veracity of something like this? It’s a really good video. Something about the kayaker that disappears doesn’t look quite right, but…

Can any picture from the internet be trusted? Everytime someone shows me a picture and says, “I got this from the internet” or “So-and-so emailed this to me”, I get suspicious.

Anyway, it’s still scary, fake or not.

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Ross Laird
January 13th, 2005
9:47 am

Whether it’s faked or not, whales are indeed “big” (orcas, like the one in the video, are not actually whales but dolphins). But consider that the whale Mocha Dick, who was the inspiration for Melville’s Moby Dick, rammed and sunk a whaling ship of almost 200 feet. Mocha Dick was about 80 feet long — four or five times as large as the whale in the video.

Owen Chase, a crewman onboard the ship that was sunk, wrote about it in his “Narrative of the Wreck of the Whaleship Essex,” one of the greatest survival stories ever to to be written (starving cannibalism, drifting, death…)

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Ross Laird
January 13th, 2005
10:08 am

Two more tibdits: there is some question as to whether orcas have ever attacked humans (maybe, but almost never). And the largest blue whales — wait for it — are as much as 200 feet long.

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double-plus-ungood
January 13th, 2005
11:22 am

There was an instance of a kayaker in Washington State going missing who was last seen in the company of a pod of Orcas, as reported in the excellent book Deep Trouble” from Sea Kayaker magazine. No smoking gun, mind you, but still very suspicious.

Additionally, there was an excellent photograph in Sea Kayaker a few months ago of a Humpback Whale (I think) breaching in this manner right beside a kayak. The photographer was overturned, but managed to hang onto the camera and do a roll, and then quickly exit the scene. The breaching whale was accompanying a female with calf, and so the close landing may have been intentional.

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Andrea
January 13th, 2005
2:43 pm

The footage for the Powerade commercial was taken from Lolita: Slave for Entertainment. The movie was filmed around San Juan Island, which is why the locale may look familiar to readers from BC.

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Maktaaq
January 14th, 2005
12:10 am

Not entirely related, but a killer whale once “kissed” me. The impact was so great I was seeing stars for a few minutes. There is even a picture of the incident floating around somewhere.

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dora
January 15th, 2005
3:09 pm

where is the link to see it i could not find it..thanks

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Joe
January 19th, 2005
9:50 pm

The supposedly real story and the url for the video, a Powerade ad.

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Anonymous
January 19th, 2005
9:51 pm

http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/kayak.asp

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Joe
January 19th, 2005
9:52 pm

http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/kayak.asp

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randall enos
December 15th, 2006
11:16 am

The blue whale is the largest creature that has ever lived on the Earth.

While Herman Melville and a few others of his time thought that Mocha Dick was the whale that attacked the Essex (his size has been given as anywhere from 70 feet to a hundred)…that fact is not definite. Owen Chase never said it was Mocha Dick in his report on the incident…neither did any of the others.

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