A travel influencer came face to face with a bowhead whale in a remote Russian bay – and said the moment left her unable to breathe.
Anastasia Nemtina filmed the encounter in Wrangel Bay near the Shantar Islands, in Russia’s Khabarovsk Krai, on May 29.
The whale surfaced beside her, close enough to look straight at her – before swimming under her.
“The feelings are indescribable,” Nemtina said in a social media post. “This is delight and fear at the same time, it felt like I had stopped breathing.”
She posted the footage alongside drone shots taken from above, which show the true scale of the animal.
“From the video you won’t say it’s gigantic, but there is a drone photo in my profile, you will be shocked,” she said.
Commenters identified the animal as a bowhead whale, known in Russian as the Greenland whale.
Bowheads live in Arctic and subarctic waters and are built for life among the ice, with a skull heavy enough to break through it from below.
They are among the longest-lived animals on the planet.
The Sea of Okhotsk holds one of the smallest bowhead populations anywhere, which makes an encounter this close unusual.
The Shantar Islands, in the far east of Russia, draw whale watchers each summer for exactly this reason.
Nemtina summed up the moment in a line she posted in Russian: “I look at the whale, the whale looks at me.”
