I felt like a mouse next to a freight train. She did notice, at the last moment, before this seemingly inevitable collision took place. She simply turned and moved on past. I could have reached out and touched her. I didn’t. I was just watching this creature go by. Then she went over in the direction of Al. He was so busy filming another whale that he didn’t see that he was about to get clobbered by this whale. In fact, it looked as though this 15-foot-long flipper would decapitate him. Chuck Nicklin saw it too, and both of us started to hoot. You can yell underwater, and people can usually hear. I knew that Al heard us, but being a good photographer, he was really concentrating, wasn’t going to be distracted. When the whale passed him, she lifted her flipper up and over his head to miss him. It created enough of a wash so that he was certainly aware that there was something very big, very close, and he almost dropped his camera. I’ve never seen him come so close to putting it down, forever. But he didn’t, and the collision didn’t happen. After that moment though, first my encounter, and then watching how this near-accident didn’t occur, we just stopped worrying. It was very clear that they knew exactly where their big bodies were. They had no intention of bashing into us, they had complete control. And for the next two-and-a-half hours, these five whales and these three human beings just had, at least from our standpoint, the most incredible experience perhaps of my entire life up to that point. It was just amazing.