NANTUCKET, MASS. (WHDH) - A fishing crew pulling in its last haul off the coast of Nantucket Sunday got a whale of a surprise — an orca swimming right by their boat.
“I thought, at first, porpoise. Maybe shark,” said Captain Jerry Leeman, recalling the dorsal fin rising up next to his vessel. “But then, all of a sudden, it kept coming out of the water.”
Leeman got his phone and filmed a video of the killer whale’s tall dorsal fin poking out of the water as it dives into the depths. Leeman his crew wanted the whale to stick around.
“We followed along. A couple of the boys got excited; tried throwing him a couple of fish and I was like, ‘Oh, I guess we’re feeding him now,” Leeman said, adding that the leviathan seemed more interested in the boat than the food. “He just kept rolling onto his side, coming back up and down. Back off a little bit and then come up ahead.”
Orcas don’t usually swim this far south in the Atlantic and in his 21 years on the water, Leeman has only seen a few, so he was excited by the encounter.
“He got within 10 to 12 feet of the boat a few times, just staring at us. Pretty cool.”
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