‘Mind-blowing’ photos and video show orcas swimming off Pismo Beach coast
Photographer Vincent Shay was floating in a small, motor-powered boat off the coast of Pismo Beach when he spotted something he’s never seen there before.
Two pods of orcas were swimming in the calm waters of the Pacific Ocean seven miles off shore.
“All of a sudden ... I hear blows up towards the lighthouse around 6:45 p.m. ...” Shay said. “Next thing you know, I look up toward where I heard the sound and I see a full-body breach of one of these orcas.”
The Avila Beach resident quickly used his Canon R5 camera with its telephoto lens to get a better look at the killer whales as they leaped from the water. Within just a few minutes, he had captured shots of the orcas breaching the water and a video of them blowing spouts of water spray.
Shay said he screamed later when he saw the “mind-blowing” images had captured.
“I don’t know how I got so lucky with being in the middle of the ocean,” said Shay, who shared the pictures on Facebook and Instagram.
Shay is the owner of Mermaid Market in Port San Luis and a wildlife photographer, combining his love of photography with his affinity for nature.
“I know a lot of other photographers around here that take some pretty amazing photos with whales and dolphins,” he said, but many of them are limited by their ability to explore the coast. “They don’t have the luxury of spending tons and tons of time out there like I do.”
Encounter with 2 pods of orcas was rare experience
According to Shay, the first pod of orcas he spotted consisted of a large male, two smaller adults and a baby orca, or calf.
One of the adult orcas was blowing bubbles, Shay said. “It seemed like it was teaching the calf to hunt.”
Shay said that pod included an orca that had not been seen since 2021.
California Killer Whale Project researcher Alisa Schulman-Janiger identified the marine mammal as CA138 after seeing Shay’s photo of it on Facebook, he said. She’s a member of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Stranding Response and Large Whale Entanglement Response teams.
As Shay turned toward the shore, he came across yet another pod of killer whales.
The second pod was made up of five more whales, he said, though it was darker and harder to photograph them.
“They move quick,” Shay said of the orcas. “They were gone as quick as they came.”
Schulman-Janiger commented on Facebook that the second pod he encountered included an orca known to researchers as CA216B — nicknamed Jagged — which she said was “infrequently seen.”
Seeing two pods of whales in such close proximity is rare in the wild, she wrote.
Shay, who took up photography 36 years ago using his brother’s Nikon FA camera, said he never intended to get into wildlife photography.
As a self-taught photographer, he said, he’s had to come up with his own techniques.
“One of the first things I do — and it may sound kind of quirky — (is) I always ask for permission from the animals to take their photos,” he said. “I actually say it out loud.”
“It’s really cool because they seem to hear me,” he added.
Shay noted that wildlife photography requires patience and luck as well as skill. With time, he noted, photographers will also develop a natural intuition regarding when to get out their cameras.
“If you just turn your motor off, you sit there and you can hear things much more than you see things,” he said.
This story was originally published September 13, 2022 at 9:10 AM with the headline "‘Mind-blowing’ photos and video show orcas swimming off Pismo Beach coast."
