Canadian tourist's whale breach death must be freak accident, say tour operators

The death of a Canadian woman after a grey whale crashed into a tourist boat in Mexico is likely a terrible and totally random accident, say whale-watching tour operators in Canada.

But it does raise questions about the regulations and training that govern the tourism industry and whale-watching in particular, they said.

“It’s very, very sad,” said Debbie Davis, who operates Prince Rupert Adventure Tours with her husband on the north coast of British Columbia, to Yahoo Canada News.

“Whales are unpredictable. People have to be cautious – it’s a wild animal.”

Early accounts of the accident differed.

Firefighters said the whale breached and landed on the boat near Cabo San Lucas, while the tour company said the operator had to make a sudden movement to avoid the surfacing whale, which still hit the side of the vessel.

The 35-year-old woman, whose name was not released, ended up in the water. She was taken to hospital, where she died from her injuries, reports said.

The woman was with 23 others, returning from a snorkeling trip out of the popular tourist destination on the Pacific coast. Two other people were reportedly injured.

“More than likely it’s an accidental kind of thing,” Michael Gatherall, who has operated Gatherall’s Whale and Puffin Tours out of Bay Bulls, Nfld., told Yahoo Canada.

In his 30 years in the whale-watching industry, Gatherall said he’s heard of incidents where kayaks have had closer calls viewing than they would have liked, but no deaths.

There are many factors at play, including the size of the vessel, what kind of whale, what the whales are doing at the time and how many boats are in the area, he said.

“From our experience, we’ve never really encountered an aggressive whale,” he said. “In most cases, if a whale feels that it’s threatened or is really not interested… it will do a deep dive and just move out of the way. That’s been our experience.”

“Individual whales are like people. Some are very social and some are anti-social.”

Despite their immense size – an adult grey whale can be longer than a city bus and weigh up to 30,000 kilograms – there are few reported accidents involving the creatures.

In 2002, a California man was killed when a whale breached and landed on his 22-foot fishing boat.

And two years ago, another California man had to be rescued after a whale breached and sank his sail boat off the Mexican coast.

“The head of that whale would have had to have cleared at least 12 feet (from the water) before he came down on the boat,” Max Young told the Daily Mail at the time.

“I could see its head. It must have been a young whale because he only had a few barnacles.”

Davis also said whales can be unpredictable.

“Sometimes they’ll just breach out of nowhere,” she said.

But in her two decades of whale-watching tours, she has never seen any aggression.

“I don’t think they’re there to hurt anybody but if they’re feeding and you’re in a kayak in close proximity to the whale, they can come up and bump it and tip it over. I don’t think they would hurt anybody intentionally.”