Man Rowing Across Ocean Suddenly Realizes He's Surrounded by Over 1,000 Whales

Whale and Hearty

A particularly ambitious extreme athlete had the encounter of a lifetime partway across a journey across the Atlantic Ocean in a small rowing boat.

As seen in a clip shared by Tom Waddington on Instagram, a massive group of whales surrounded his boat and followed him for hours.

"Wow, that is so cool," he said laughing. "I love it, but I'm scared they're gonna hit my rudder."

"They're so close I can hear them," he added. "They're blowing bubbles, look!"

"What a special treat," Waddington said. "I've seen loads of whales, but they've just come to say hello," adding that he was cheered up after feeling down due to "some rain this morning."

Row Along

While shaken by the unique encounter, Waddington made it through the ordeal unscathed.

"They were just playing and going under the boat and I was taking videos," he said in an update on Instagram.

Footage shows a huge pod of whales joining him — even while he was trying to row away from them.

"I'm two hours in now into rowing with these thousands of whales," he said in the video, clearly shaken. "I don't know what to do, I'm shitting myself. They're gonna hit the boat."

As NPR reports, Waddington's team suggests the visitors were long-finned pilot whales, which are known to be social and live in large schools of hundreds of animals.

Waddington, a ski instructor in his normal life, is raising money for a British mental health charity called Mind, which is led by famous actor Stephen Fry.

His coach Charlie Pitcher, who also crossed the Atlantic in a rowboat, later notified him that he did "exactly the opposite" of what he was supposed to: "be quiet and still."

Waddington summed up the experience perfectly in his video.

"It's an amazing sight, but also so scary," he said.

More on whales: SETI Institute Claims They've Successfully Communicated With a Whale