There’s just nothing quite like heading out to the ocean, riding the wind on your windsurfing board (or whatever it’s called), and becoming one with the sea. Just you and the glistening waves, as you’re ferried along, seemingly by the will of Poseidon himself. Then, all of that majesty is derailed because a whale decided to catch a breath right in front of you.
Wait… what?
Believe it or not, this is exactly what happened to a windsurfer in San Francisco Bay a few days ago. The windsurfer, Eric Kramer, got rocket propelled off his board when a surfacing gray whale popped up in his path. Even crazier, someone just so happened to be recording the whole event as it unfolded.
WATCH: Windsurfer Gets Absolutely Leveled by a Whale in San Francisco Bay
Kramer had already slowed down after spotting whales nearby, but the animal surfaced directly in his path anyway. Both survived, which isn’t always the case when windsurfers collide with surfacing whales. While the events are not necessarily linked, there has been a spate of unexplained gray whale deaths in the San Francisco Bay area of late, with at least one of the deaths having been caused by some kind of human vessel.
Gray whales have been showing up in San Francisco Bay earlier than usual this year, part of a migration from Baja California to Arctic feeding grounds. At the same time, the bay is packed with ferries, cargo ships, and recreational traffic. According to marine experts speaking with SFGate, it’s a tight, busy corridor where large animals and fast-moving vessels are forced into the same limited space. Collisions are, unfortunately, inevitable.
Gray whale populations have dropped by more than half since 2016, according to The Guardian. They’ve fallen from around 27,000 to under 13,000, with many of the whales showing signs of malnutrition. Their reproductive rates are also plummeting. During the 2025 migration, only 85 mother-calf pairs were recorded off the coast of central California, marking the lowest ever recorded. Last year, there were 21 gray whale deaths, the highest in 25 years.
All of this can be attributed to dwindling Arctic food supplies, driven by climate change. This little lesson in gray whale migration may seem disconnected from the story of a windsurfer colliding with a gray whale, but it’s actually exactly why the gray whale was there in the first place. The whales are adapting to a changing world, rerouting their migratory patterns and lingering in places like San Francisco Bay. The Bay just happened to be busy, filled with people like Kramer, who don’t intend to hurt these creatures. But when there’s so much overlap in a relatively small piece of the ocean, man and whale are destined to collide.
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