‘Absolutely incredible’: Man rowing solo across Atlantic is surrounded by whales

Tom Waddington is on a quest to row across the Atlantic Ocean all by himself — but on Sunday, he found plenty of company at sea, when a pod of pilot whales thronged around him. They followed him for hours, growing from a few playful animals to hundreds of large creatures. At least one smacked into his small boat.

The whales popped their heads above the surface and seemed to play together — a gam of whales, gadding about — as Waddington, who is rowing some 2,000 miles from the Newfoundland coast to Penzance, in the United Kingdom, watched in amazement.

“This is so cool,” Waddington said as he took a video of the whales’ antics. With a laugh, he added, “I love it, but I'm scared they're gonna hit my rudder.”

Waddington emerged unscathed — but a little shaken by the risks mammals weighing thousands of pounds can pose to his boat and equipment on an unsupported solo trip.

“They were just playing and going under the boat and I was taking videos,” he said on Facebook and Instagram, describing hundreds of whales around him. Then one of the whales slammed into the side of his light boat.

“And I was like, Oh my God. And suddenly it turned from David Attenborough into Moby Dick. And I was really scared.”

Waddington’s team on land believes the playful mammals are long-finned pilot whales, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says are known to live in the North Atlantic and “are very social, living in large schools of hundreds of animals separated into close-knit pods of 10 to 20 individuals.”

The whales appeared at a moment when Waddington was feeling a bit low, he said, after a morning full of rain.

“What a special treat,” he said on the video. “I've seen loads of whales, but they've just come to say hello.”

When it came time to take leave of his visitors, Waddington says he wasn’t sure how to do that. He tried shouting a bit, and splashed his oars. He veered north — but the whales followed, and for more than two hours, it seemed more whales kept showing up.

Waddington, who works as a ski instructor, is rowing across the ocean for a fundraiser benefiting Mind, the British mental health charity led by the actor Stephen Fry. Waddington estimates that more than 1,000 whales swam with him. For advice, he called his coach, Charlie Pitcher (who has himself rowed across the Atlantic).

“He was like, the best thing to do is, be quiet and still — which is exactly the opposite of what I did" earlier, he said.

Eventually, the whales left the boat and its sole occupant with a rare story about crossing the Grand Banks, the large fishery at the edge of the North American continental shelf.

“It was absolutely incredible,” Waddington said.

The encounter didn’t harm the boat, or its progress across open water.

Between favorable winds and waves, and what Waddington called “whale-fueled adrenaline,” his boat is making good progress, he added. You can track its voyage online.