Aquarium Owner Has Close Encounter
With Killer Whales

Tuesday, January 30, 2007
NORWAY - An aquarium owner in western Norway set off in a small boat on the Sognefjord to take photos last week and suddenly found himself in the middle of a group of killer whales.

Bjørn Skanke Sande, who owns the Sognefjord Aquarium, is also a hobby photographer and merely meant to capture some shots of the winter landscape around scenic Balestrand.

Instead he had a close encounter with what the Norwegians call "spekkhoggere" or orcas, also known as killer whales.

"I heard something breathing very heavily behind me," Sande told Aftenposten.no. "When I turned around, I saw the fins that stood straight up and knew right away they were orcas."

He said the whales were only about three to four meters from his small boat. "Suddenly I was in the middle of the flock," he said.

The killer whales, who stay together in family groups, swam around Sande's boat for about five minutes.

"I just took pictures like crazy," he said with a laugh, not least with the idea of showing them at his aquarium, which is often visited by school groups. One of his photos shows five whales, but he thinks there were a total of seven of them around his boat.

He said one of the whales quietly came out of the water as if to orient itself, and then disappeared again without making a sound. "It was a powerful sight," he said.

Whales are not unusual off the coast of Norway, which is often criticized internationally for its commercial whale hunt. Pods of orcas are also known to follow the local herring streams and feed off the coast in the winter.

When the famed whale Keiko made his appearance in Norwegian waters a few years ago, it was hoped he would join such a pod. He never did, though, and later died.

Sande noted that it was unusual, however, for so many orcas to congregate so far up the fjord. Even though he's in the aquarium business, he'd never been so close to whales before.

"This was quite different from looking at them with binoculars from a distance," he told Aftenposten.no. "It was a fantastic experience."

Source: Aftenposten