Bad luck became serendipity for a Canadian man when his dropped camera captured dramatic whale feeding behavior.
Peter Mieras is a British Columbia-based underwater videographer. He was experimenting with attaching a camera to a fishing pole when he ran into a hiccup — the line broke, and his camera sank beneath the water.
“I thought, ‘That sucks,’” Mieras told CTV News Vancouver.
He had all the diving gear he needed to retrieve his lost camera. But before he could, a flock of birds and a group of sea lions began feasting on a dense ball of anchovies just off his dock. No videographer would pass up a chance to record that, so Mieras pulled out another camera to capture the action.
Then, a humpback whale joined in the meal, breaching several times as it pushed through the anchovies. Mieras and his wife, Kathy Johnson, spent the next two hours watching the show, then fished out the camera once the animals had dispersed.
But any footage Mieras recorded from his dock paled into comparison to what he saw when he plugged in his once-sunken camera.
The device had landed at a perfect angle to capture the hunt from underwater. In another stroke of luck, the school of anchovies lined up perfectly with the sunshine refracting through the water, meaning the humpback is in perfect silhouette as it crunches through the fish.
“This is once in a lifetime,” Mieras said of the footage.
“We just burst with glee,” Johnson echoed. “We just watched it over and over again because we just couldn’t believe what we were seeing.”
Watch it for yourself below.
