There are no mistakes, just happy little accidents. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Remember Bob Ross’s happy little accidents? “We don’t have mistakes,” Ross famously said. “We have happy little accidents.” Well, a guy standing on a dock had a pretty amazing one when he dropped his camera off a dock and captured some amazing whale action.
Peter Mieras, an underwater videographer with Subvision Productions, didn’t plan on dropping his Insta360 into the water when he left his house in Barkley Bay, B.C. He did have a plan, though. Mieras wanted to attach the camera to a fishing pole, cast it in, and reel it back. The line, as is all too often the case with fishing, broke. His camera sank in about 30 feet of water.
“I thought, ‘that sucks,'” he told CTV News. While he was deciding whether it was worth a deep, cold plunge, the local wildlife alerted him to something brewing.
“(It was) a little bit like a National Geographic moment,” Mieres remembered. As he stood there, a flock of birds and a few sea lions began attacking a bait ball, so he pulled out another camera to film the action. That was when a humpback whale joined the party. It was within spitting distance from where Mieres and his wife Kathy were standing.
“Anything that size, that close,” Kathy said, “it almost took your breath away.”
For two hours, Peter and Kathy stood in amazement. After the feeding frenzy abated, Peter was able to retrieve his camera, and when he pulled the footage, he was stunned at what he saw.
The camera captured the humpback whale swimming through the ball of fish in crystal clear detail as the sun shone down from above.
“We just burst with glee,” Kathy told CTV. “We just watched it over and over again because we just couldn’t believe what we were seeing.”
