{"id":424335,"date":"2025-12-04T15:19:14","date_gmt":"2025-12-04T15:19:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/424335\/"},"modified":"2025-12-04T15:19:14","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T15:19:14","slug":"whale-shark-seen-of-waters-in-west-oahu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/424335\/","title":{"rendered":"Whale shark seen of waters in West Oahu"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"text | article-text\">HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) &#8211; One of the ocean\u2019s largest creatures made a surprise appearance off West Oahu, and the incredible encounter was caught on camera.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\">The morning of Nov. 21, about three miles off Makaha, a tour group looking for dolphins spotted a massive whale shark.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\">Photographer Keely Knauff told Hawaii News Now the giant fish circled him and his crew from \u2018Dolphins And You\u2019 for about 15 minutes.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\">\u201c(It was a) surreal experience to be able to swim with such a gentle creature, really, because it swims so slowly,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\">The 23-year-old Kaiser High graduate estimated the whale shark was about 25 feet long. <\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\">Despite being dwarfed, Knauff said he was too excited to be afraid.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\">\u201cI know it has the word shark in the name, but I always knew whale sharks were just super gentle, and fear didn\u2019t even come across,\u201d he said. \u201cI was just so too in the moment, just staring. I couldn\u2019t rip my eyes off of it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\">Knaufer said he\u2019s only been with the tour group for five months, and this whale shark sighting was a first for him.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\">His captain, who\u2019s been on the water for 15 years, said they only see a whale shark about once every three years.<\/p>\n<p class=\"copyright |\">Copyright 2025 Hawaii News Now. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) &#8211; One of the ocean\u2019s largest creatures made a surprise appearance off West Oahu, and the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":424336,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[197836,197834,197835,159,67,132,68,192268,837],"class_list":{"0":"post-424335","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-dolphins-and-you","9":"tag-keely-knaufer","10":"tag-makaha","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-whale-shark","16":"tag-wildlife"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115661973926741903","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/424336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}