BARKLEY SOUND, B.C. — After glancing out the front window of their waterfront home, Kathy Johnson and Peter Mieras noticed something unusual on the surface of the ocean. “Peter yelled, ‘Whale! It’s got to be a whale!’” Kathy recalls with a laugh. “And he took off, as he does.” Peter grabbed a video camera, jumped in his boots, and ran down to their dock. “I kept looking and suddenly this whale popped up,” Peter smiles. “And I immediately go, ‘Oh my God!’” Peter captured video of the humpback whale rising out of the water and turning around to swim back along the dock. Peter kept recording as he followed it to the other end of the dock, but by the time he’d placed his camera in the water to record it, the whale had turned around again. So, Peter started running back to where he started, the camera recording the whole time. “I basically did a dive on the dock,” Peter says. “I stuck my hand as deep as I could with the camera [still] running into the water.” Peter captured footage of the whale swimming so close to his hand that the whale tucked its fin in so it wouldn’t hit Peter. By this time, Kathy had climbed up to the bow of the boat to offer direction. “The whale would show up and then I would say, ‘He’s going this way!” Kathy smiles. “And then Peter would jump up to the other end of the dock to do it again.” For almost 30 minutes, Peter and the whale kept going back and forth along the dock together. “And each time I was running like a madman,” Peter smiles, before beginning to hum an old TV theme. “And in my head, I had the Benny Hill music going.” Peter ended up editing the footage of his back-and-forth encounter with the whale like the British comedian would have, by adding a suitably silly soundtrack. “It was really funny. I actually wondered if the whale was snickering behind his fin,” Kathy recalls with a laugh. “Peter will not anthropomorphize the animals, but I will.” Whether the humpback found all this as humorous as the humans or not, Peter and Kathy agree that although they’ve been visited by countless other underwater creatures while running their Rendezvous Dive Adventures, this is a whale of a tale they’ll never forget. “It’s just amazement. Respect,” Peter says. “It’s a big animal, but it’s so gentle and so aware of you being there.” “It‘s a good reminder that it’s not us and them,” Kathy smiles. “It’s all of us together.”
