A group of fishermen off the coast of Chatham had a close encounter with a pod of killer whales who swam around and under their boat on Tuesday.
The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, a Cape Cod-based group which conducts marine research, published a video and field report to its Youtube channel. Alex Wyckoff, Matt Ward, Mark Ward and Capt. Justin Daly were fishing for tuna 12 miles off of Chatham when they ran into a group of orcas.
"Oh my god, bro. It's right there," one of the men says in the video. "Ohhh! It's a killer whale, baby!"
According to their report, there were at least four whales who swam next to the boat for 10 to 15 minutes as the fisherman trolled for tuna. One breached 40 feet off the boat's bow, the report said.
"One was significantly bigger than the others, one was very small which we thought was a baby, and the other two we could only tell they were different by their dorsal fins," the report said. "Also while we were mixed in with whales we had three to four tuna marks on the fish finder so immediately we thought they may have been feeding on tuna."
Killer whale sightings are rare off the Massachusetts coast. There are an estimated 200 orcas total in the West Atlantic between Cape Cod and Labrador in Canada, the Cape Cod Times reported.
Wyckoff, Ward, Ward and Daly's ecstatic reaction to the encounter was reminiscent of Malden resident Michael Bergin's viral run-in with an ocean sunfish last September. The fishermen kept their cool better than Bergin, who described the sunfish as a "sea monstah" in between unprintable exclamations of excitement.