It looks pretty close and were I there I probably wouldn’t quibble over the difference, I’d be screaming “holy crap, I almost got eaten by a whale!”
That said, the whale came back down and you see his fin still isn’t reaching the surfer, so its mouth was probably a good 20 feet away from her.
I think that the point is that she had just paddled across the area where the whale had come up. 10 seconds earlier and she would have been scrubbing baleen from the inside.
Who knows what could have happened if those yelly gulls hadn’t shown up.
The humpback was lunge feeding, going for a bait ball of fish that have been forced close to the surface. They use rings of bubbles to coral the fish together. The whale come up some distance from the kayack and surf-board. I think the bait-ball would tend to avoid them, perceiving them as another threat, so the people probably weren’t in that much danger.
Even a blue whale’s gullet is relatively tiny 4 inches across, so nobody was in danger of being swallowed per se, tho getting scooped up (and then presumably spit out) would probably have hurt.
I think that the camera operator was even closer.
The second whale certainly comes pretty close to the surfer. Even if she was in no danger of being picked up or accidentally swallowed it’d be a hell of a surprise.
Oh wow! That gave me shivers of the GOOD kind… what an awesome thing to see! I am WAY jealous!
So no cries of “Holy crap!” from the camera person? How disappointing.