we re going to have a party all night long all night lionel richie, man. saw him at a jazz fest, that was a party. he can go, man. hello. sorry. finally this half-hour, an amazing whale tail for a few california kayakers, lucky enough to get within arm s length of a pod of blue whales. their adventure was all caught on tape. it is something you really should not try at home. abc s diana alvear has more. reporter: good morning. when i saw this video, i wanted to drive to the beach, rent a kayak, and do the exact same thing. unfortunately, that s what has whale experts so worried. holy cow. reporter: that is an understatement. these kayakers were close enough
a big animal unless you get close to it. and we were trying to get as close as we can, and maybe we 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 ton, and it s solid bone and barnacles. and it came at him fast and hard. he really 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, 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. think if that whale tail had been two or three inches lower it would have hit him in the temple. he d probably be killed. it nearly knocked him out. it was a nasty incident. it could have gone really south quite qu