Vancouver woman swims with grey whale by accident

I didn't think for one second that it would attack me or anything or that I was in danger. Jenny White is an avid ocean swimmer. If you look closely you'll see her in the water off Vancouver and she wasn't alone. I heard a whale blow and I went like kind of my eyes kind of went bink and I looked over my shoulder and I just saw it going back under the water. So I swam away from it. To her surprise a gray whale was swimming right beside her. It was extremely close like I would say 15 feet away and it had its head out of the water and its body and then it torqued toward me and dove underneath and that's when my heart rate spiked and I tried to just calm down and I thought I'll just swim slowly. So why is this gray whale in Vancouver and why is it swimming so close to the shore? These animals will stop and forage. They feed on amphipods, ghost shrimp and other critters. They're benthic feeders and I know the footage of this animal you can see plumes of sediment so it's actively foraging but they get in really shallow water and they often look like they're in distress. This gray whale appears to be healthy which hasn't been the case recently for these whales. Five gray whales have washed up dead off the west coast of Vancouver Island and it's not just happening in Canada. More than two dozen gray whales have been found dead in American waters off the west coast and the reason? Well they're not getting enough food in their feeding grounds in the Arctic. Experts believe that they're starving to death and right now these giants are making that massive journey again north to their feeding grounds so they need lots of space. If you can avoid the animal that would be appreciated for it to be able to to forage and we don't want disturbance and we don't want to have to have fishery officers out there monitoring this animal's movements and making sure people are keep giving it its distance but we will if we have to. Everyone needs to stay back at least 100 meters from gray whales. White did everything right and swam away. It's kind of a neat unique situation that in Vancouver and B.C. we're so lucky to have these big massive animals. They're hard to see when they're foraging in shallow water they're not coming up very far so again you have to be vigilant. If you witness people disturbing any whale you can report it to Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Alana Kelly, CBC News, Squamish.