A new challenger has appeared. Photo: Fielder Films // YouTube
An orca encounter will change your life. Whether it’s a brief glimpse while sightseeing or a pack of angry cetaceans sinking your boat out of pure spite, any run-in with the wolves of the sea is going to be memorable. However, coming across orcas while surfing is something even more special.
The moment comes from a clip recently posted by Fielder Films, a small studio run by Ben Weiland and Brian Davis. The pair recently followed up their award-winning project Island X with a trip to the North Pacific for Return to the Bering. In it, Noah Wegrich, Pete Devries, Mark McInnis and Josh Mulcoy visited St. George Island, where they had the drop-in of a lifetime.
“On St. George, it feels just alive. Everything’s wild there,” explains Noah Wegrich at the start of the video “It’s more animal than it is human.”
And boy were they proven right. From the beginning, the session seemed to have an almost supernatural air to it. “We were coming down the road and this little white fox was like peering over the brush and he turned around. He just guided us,” continues Wegrich. ”I thought, ‘Oh, maybe he’s guiding us to some epic waves.’”
When they arrived, they were greeted by even more wildlife: a horde of seals. “We paddle out and there’s just seals everywhere,” explained Josh Mulcoy. “These little fur seals. They were so curious jumping out of the water and then one of them was jumping out at us with his teeth open.”
It turned out the seals were a harbinger for much bigger game. “[We] jumped out in the water and within 20 minutes or something, the boys who were filming just started yelling,” says Wegrich. Soon after, another surfer yelled “Orcas!”
Back on the beach, the filmers were torn between capturing the moment, and attempting to save their subjects from watery annihilation. “It was crazy,” said Davis. “It’s like, do you flag them in or do you just keep filming?”
The answer, of course, was to keep filming.
