that one whale came up right underneath me. i m looking like, oh, my god, he s going to hit me. i mean, you ve got a couple tons of whale tail coming at you that fast, and it s barnacle and bone. it would have been like getting hit with a baseball bat the size of a tree. the day starts out calmly for two experienced divers, danny morrow and jim cosmic. morrow s had his share of close encounters. as we just witnessed, a massive octopus put the squeeze on his good friend, doug pemberton. that close call turned out okay as doug clawed his way to freedom at the last second. morrow has been around the world and back again, filming the wonders of the world s oceans. his goal on this expedition is to videotape mating humpback whales in the waters of the silver banks whale sanctuary. literally on the last day of the trip, we stumbled onto a young male and a young female and they were courting, and they were oblivious to us.
pushed it a bit too far this particular day. this time with dangerous consequences. i think it s easy to get lulled into a false sense of security when you re filming big animals. we were right in their face for the better part of three hours. and towards the end of it, i think they just got fed up. as morrow s partner swims in for a better shot, the 40-ton monster, with a flick of his massive tail, delivers an incredible blow. this particular male was probably 40 feet long, maybe 50 feet long, which means he was probably in the neighborhood of 40 or 50 tons. i think that tail probably weighed a few tons. and it s solid bone and barnacles. and it came at him fast and hard. i knew he got hit. i asked him if he was okay, and he pulled his hand away from his head and it had blood on it. the whale tail had cut his head wide open. jim cosmic is stunned. i don t think he registered immediately exactly what had
quite quickly. luckily, jim cosmic is okay. the gash on his head heals without stitches, and he s back, doing what he loves just weeks later. he said that was the most intense experience he d ever had in terms of a physical altercation. i mean, he s a tough s.o.b., jim cosmic, but he got smacked by that whale and i think it humbled him a bit. and i think he s a little more cautious now when he goes in the water with big animals. cosmic is not the only one. the team tries to stay away from close-up shots after their teammate s close encounter with the back end of a 40-ton whale. after that incident we backed off a little bit and focused a little more on the wide shots, because i think we were getting a little too close. coming up, a black marlin skewers an angler. oh, my god! oh, my god! i honestly thought he was dead. and jaws takes the bait and comes back for the main course. when she hit, it was like a car accident.
they just let us do what we wanted. they weren t full-grown adults. they were i guess for lack of a better analogy, they were teenagers, and they were amorous teenagers, and they were cavorting like teenagers do. but, remember, these aren t like your typical adolescents. humpback whales are one of the largest species on the planet. they grow up to 50 feet in length and weigh almost 79,000 pounds. normally humpbacks stay clear of humans, but come too close, and the results can be deadly. a swat of that gargantuan tail can turn a grown man into fish food with one direct hit. i think they started to think of us as mosquitoes. as cameraman jim cosmic moves closer, the whale appears to swim away. the divers follow. you can t get a good shot of a big animal unless you get close to it. and we were trying to get as close as we can, and maybe we
hard. i knew he got hit. i asked him if he was okay, and he pulled his hand away from his head and it had blood on it. the whale tail had cut his head wide open. jim cosmic is stunned. i don t think he registered immediately exactly what had actually happened, but i knew he was in trouble because he went straight to the surface and he was holding the top of his head. morrow thinks the whale intentionally took aim at his partner. whales and dolphins, their tales go like this. and for him to suddenly go like this, it s a clear deliberate motion that he was trying to get rid of this pesky person, or probably in his eyes it was like a fly. we were bugging these animals because we were trying to get good close-up footage. weak, bleeding, and in a state of shock, cosmic swims to the surface and falls into the waiting boat. the tail. he just whacked me. morrow and the crew try to make sense of what happened. to this day, it s one of the scariest things morrow has ever seen. i