'It was swimming around me': Free-diver captures close encounter with orca
When Ping-Yi Wu started taking a selfie while floating in the ocean near East Sooke, B.C., the tourist never imagined she would eventually capture an orca with her camera.
“I was just looking around,” Ping-Yi smiles in a Zoom call from her home in Taipei. “Just seeing what was underwater.”
Ping-Yi had travelled to B.C. from Taiwan to visit her friend and fellow free-diver Ethan Peng.
“Everything just seemed normal,” Ethan recalls. “We had a good time in the water.”
Ethan was hoping to introduce Ping-Yi to some of the many creatures he’d met under the sea, like an octopus (which are certainly shy around strangers), or the manta ray (that seemed to greet the divers with a smile).
“Whenever wild animals come by,” Ethan says. “I always think that’s good luck!”
So when seals kept swimming around him, Ethan called his friend over to get some footage with her camera. But Ping-Yi kept missing them.
“I think, ‘Why not me?’” Ping Yi smiles. “Why I cannot see?”
“And then five minutes later,” Ethan says. “Ping was screaming, ‘Ahhh! Oh my God!’”
Ethan assumed Ping-Yi had been startled by a seal, until he noticed a large black fin cutting through the water.
“I realized I was wrong very quickly,” Ethan says.
And then, approaching Ping-Yi quite curiously was an orca.
“I was shocked,” Ethan says.
“It was swimming circles around me,” Ping-Yi says. “It was very close.”
Although it was close enough to touch, she didn’t. Although it felt like a dream, it wasn’t.
“I feel wow!” Ping-Yi smiles. “Beautiful.”
“I feel blessed,” Ethan says. “Honoured.”
As Ethan looks back on the video, he also couldn’t feel more grateful to have shared it with his friend.
“It is the experience in our water here,” Ethan says.
Which is why — despite having her video as a souvenir — before returning home, Ping-Yi bought a more tangible reminder of her remarkable orca encounter — a "fluffy, killer whale stuffie."
“It’s a very good experience and memory,” Ping-Yi smiles while cradling the toy in her arm. “A forever memory.”
CTVNews.ca Top Stories
Parents of infant who died in wrong-way crash on Ontario's Hwy. 401 were in same vehicle
Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit has released new details about a wrong-way collision in Whitby on Monday night that claimed the lives of four people.
Three Quebec men from same family father hundreds of children
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
B.C. mayor stripped of budget, barred from committees over Indigenous residential schools book
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Jurors in Trump hush money trial hear recording of pivotal call on plan to buy affair story
Jurors in the hush money trial of Donald Trump heard a recording Thursday of him discussing with his then-lawyer and personal fixer a plan to purchase the silence of a Playboy model who has said she had an affair with the former president.
Captain sentenced to 4 years for criminal negligence in fiery deaths of 34 aboard scuba boat
A federal judge on Thursday sentenced a scuba dive boat captain to four years in custody and three years supervised release for criminal negligence after 34 people died in a fire aboard the vessel.
New scam targets Canada Carbon Rebate recipients
Fake text message and email campaigns trying to get money and information out of unsuspecting Canadian taxpayers have started circulating, just months after the federal government rebranded the carbon tax rebate the Canada Carbon Rebate.
Southern Alberta store broken into by burly black bear
Staff at a small southern Alberta office supply store were shocked to find someone had broken into the business last week, but they were even more confused when they discovered the culprit was a bear.
President Joe Biden calls Japan and India 'xenophobic' nations that do not welcome immigrants
President Joe Biden has called Japan and India “xenophobic” countries that do not welcome immigrants, lumping the two with adversaries China and Russia as he tried to explain their economic circumstances and contrasted the four with the U.S. on immigration.
Universities grapple with the complicated politics of campus encampments
Montreal police are facing pressure to move in and dismantle a pro-Palestinian encampment on McGill University campus on Thursday, as a growing number of universities across this country grapple with the tough decision of how to handle the protests.