This year all the ingredients were there for a successful Norwegian expedition: a good sailboat as base mobile base camp, a seaworthy rib, a great crew of 8 highly motivated and competent freedivers/sailors and of course a big chunk of luck! So far I’ve never been very lucky with orcas, only one elusive encounter in Antarctica in 2013 and a unsuccessful expedition last year. The luck turned around and we had real encounters, not just observations or animals swimming by. We gathered HD/4K videos, captured incredible 360° uw footage never seen before and tested new equipment for the Think! project . Some images will be forever engraved in my mind: a baby orca trained by adults to catch the herrings right in front of us, a pack of 5 humpbacks surrounding us while feeding, two gigantic fin whales stopping right under to look at us… the list of unforgettable underwater moments goes on and on. Maybe we deserved it a little bit as the conditions were very hard: the air temperature went down to -12°c , the water was at 2°c, the boat heating system died on the second day so we had ice inside the boat for the rest of the trip ,fortunately we had hot water to put on and remove the wetsuits. Oh and we also killed two drones…
