A Nova Scotia woman has a whale of a tale to share and a video to prove it.
Chelsea Crawford was whale watching in Mexico on Saturday when a giant gray whale came up alongside her boat and slapped her in the face.
Her friend happened to be filming the excursion and captured the incident on her cellphone.
“There were four or five whales around us so I was like, this is awesome, I should try and videotape this,” says Taylor Roy.
“I guess I ended up facing it when Chelsea was hit and it just happened at that time that I was recording. It was a total fluke.”
Crawford says the whale's tail felt "hard" and "boney." She admits she was terrified at the time, but can laugh about it now.
“I don’t know if it was more shock, or it hurting, because as soon as it was over, I started to cry,” says the 20-year-old Bridgewater woman.
“I have a little bit of a bruise on my shoulder, but that’s about it.”
Crawford says whale watching is a popular activity in the area and the whales are very friendly. She says the whale was just trying to play with her group.
“It’s normal in this area. We were in a lagoon and so they’re very friendly,” she says. “The whale wasn’t aggressive or anything, and these tours happen all day all the time. The whales are used to it. It was almost like it was playing with us.”
Crawford and Roy, a native of Lampman, Sask., wanted to share the video with their friends and family back in Canada so they decided to post it to YouTube.
Since then, the video has gone viral, earning close to 900,000 hits on YouTube.
“We thought this was so funny, we want to show our friends and family in Canada…then the views just started pouring in,” says Crawford.
Crawford and Roy are in Emiliano Zapata, Mexico building homes and doing humanitarian work with the Canadian charity Live Different. They arrived at the beginning of February and will remain in Mexico until the end of May.
