It's a classic case of life passing you by. An Instagram post on Tuesday, Feb. 3, showed a man on a boat busily fiddling with his phone, oblivious to the fact that a humpback whale just breached a few feet away from him.
Eric Smith is a professional photographer and he spent one of his afternoons a few weeks ago taking photos of an adult humpback whale and a calf swimming off Redondo Beach in California. One of his photos captured a humpback whale coming up for air, with the man and his phone just a few feet away.
Smith took to Instagram and posted the picture with the caption: "Hey dude! Stop texting. There's an enormous humpback whale two feet from your boat!"
"A mom was out there with her calf, flapping, breaching, jumping, mouths eating fish -- it was fantastic," he said.
However, the man never moved from his phone, according to Smith.
In the interest of fairness, the professional photographer said he didn't see what the man was doing on his phone. Maybe he also recently took photos and was in the middle of checking them. In the 100 or so photos that Smith took, around five showed the whale and the man together in the same frame but in each one the man on the boat was not looking at the whale.
Smith admits to getting lost in his phone as well, much like anyone with a smartphone, and recognizes device addiction is getting in the way of experiencing life.
Maybe the man's not out there to watch whales?
Whale sightings are generally common in California, after all; and if he has his own sailboat, chances are, he's seen his fair share of marine life.
For those interested in catching these massive creatures off the coast of the state, gray whales are most prominent during winter, stopping by before migrating to Mexico then returning to Alaska.
Humpbacks mostly migrate during summer. More than just the man missing out on seeing a whale, he actually missed a rare sighting. Blue whales are usually seen along the same time as humpback whales from June to September.
Chartered expeditions are scheduled throughout harbors in San Diego and Los Angeles, but many shoreline spots where whales can be seen are located in coastal parks along Southern California. Humpback whales are around 50 feet long and feature very dark gray skin.
