Better than a shark, for sure. Photo: Tavis Boise // YouTube
It’s a big ocean out there, but sometimes it doesn’t seem like it. Tavis Boise, the Santa Barbara-based foiler who famously recorded himself getting chased by a shark, just had another wild sea life encounter – this time with a whale and her calf.
On May 26, Boise was foiling off of Miramar Beach when the encounter occurred. As he notes in the video posted to his YouTube channel, it was not far out at all – approximately 200 yards offshore. As he was gliding along, he spotted what he describes as a medium-sized humpback whale and her small calf. On top of that, he had been distracted chasing the wake of a nearby boat, and didn’t notice they were there until he was practically on top of them – he estimates he ended up as close as two feet away.
That encounter in and of itself would have been a pretty incredible experience, but the whale then proceeded to actually knock Boise off his board. “I think it noticed me last minute,” he explained afterwards. “It kicked its fluke. That turbulence knocked me off my board and then it dove. That was absolutely nuts.”
“If I had hit them, I would have fallen in so hard on my head on their back,” he added. “They barely would have noticed me. Like a skateboard hitting a pebble. I would have gone flying.”
The whale run-in is all the more incredible for the fact that it’s Boise’s second crazy wildlife encounter this year. Back in April, he went viral for getting chased by a shark during a 20-mile downwind foil run from UCSB to Carpinteria. “Ron Takeda and I buzzed over a shark,” he explained in the caption to that video. “This triggered an intense curiosity and the shark followed Ron closely for over a mile. He turned left, it turned left. He sped up, it sped up. It was a full game of cat and mouse, but…with a 10- 11-foot shark.”
