B.C. man drops camera into ocean, accidentally captures 'breathtaking' whale video

Sawatsky Sign-Off: Sunken Camera Adam finds out the whale of a tale behind a camera that sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

BARKLEY SOUND, B.C. — Before it turned into an extraordinary day, Peter Mieras says it began being quite ordinary.

“It was a bit overcast,” Peter says, walking down the gangplank from his oceanfront home in Barkley Bay, B.C., to the dock below. “Calm water.”

The underwater videographer with Subvision Productions was trying to see if he could tie his new camera to an old fishing pole, so he could reel it in and out of the water. But then the line broke and the video camera sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

“I thought, ‘that sucks,’” Peter recalls.

But before he could dive down to fetch it, a flock of birds and a herd of sea lions started feasting on a school of anchovies, just a few meters from the dock.

“(It was) a little bit like a National Geographic moment,” says Peter, who then pulled out another camera and started filming the action.

But then he captured the unexpected arrival of a humpback whale joining the hunt.

“Holy moly,” Peter exclaims in the video footage as the whale rises out of the water in front of him and takes a bite out of the ball of fish.

“Oh man! It was thrilling,” Peter’s wife Kathy Johnson says.

Kathy’s been running Rendezvous Dive Adventures with her husband for decades and says they’ve never seen a whale do this right beside their dock.

“Anything that size, that close,” Kathy says. “It almost took your breath away.”

Their dog Sam seemed equally astounded, barking as the whale breached right in front of him.

After two hours of witnessing in the wonder that was unfolding above the water, Peter retrieved that camera that had sunk, and was shocked to see what had been recorded under the sea.

“This is once in a lifetime,” Peter smiles as the unexpected underwater video shows the whale swimming through the ball of fish, and the anchovies swarming the camera in retreat.

“We just burst with glee,” Kathy laughs. “We just watched it over and over again because we just couldn’t believe what we were seeing.”

While the couple was struck by how gracefully and thoughtfully the big whale swam around their small dock in such shallow water, they were also filled with gratitude that the fishing rod experiment ultimately failed.

“Failure is just another step towards success,” Peter says.

So why get frustrated when things don’t go according to plan? Things might just turn out even better than you could conceive.

“One way to get amazing things is to take the risk,” Kathy says. “You just got to try and try, because you just never know.”