ONE big whale A whale smashed into a fishing boat Tuesday morning just off the coast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, sending two people flying into the water. It was just the latest salvo in the battle between marine mammals and human boats.
Two teenage brothers who went fishing early in the morning captured the entire incident on video and came to the rescue of the survivors, according to WCVB:
Wyatt Yager, 19, of Maine, said he and his brother Colin, 16, were fishing about a mile off the New Hampshire coast looking for pogies. Colin spotted the whale and started filming, with his video showing Wyatt in the foreground.
Video shows the whale leaping, pushing the fish out of the water. As the giant animal’s mouth closed, it capsized onto the back of a nearby fishing boat with two men on board.
One of the men jumped and the other was thrown overboard when their boat capsized, and the Yager brothers said they helped pull them out of the water. The brothers said no one was seriously injured.
Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen violence between mammals on board a ship. Killer whales have managed to downed hundreds of boats just for fun in the Strait of Gibraltar since 2023. But this encounter is a much rarer event.
Whales typically stay away from Portsmouth Harbor, but humpbacks have been spotted closer to land than ever before. Just a day before the fishing boat incident, a humpback was spotted near the mouth of the Piscataqua River, WGME report.
I’m no marine biologist, but that looks like a humpback whale—a creature that can grow up to 60 feet long and weigh 36.3 tons. This isn’t a killer whale jumping out on a Mediterranean vacation—it’s a giant monster from the cold, dark depths. Sure, it’ll wreck everything you own, but they almost never try to.
