This makes for one whale of a story
The days of thinking humans and whales are on friendly terms are long gone, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve seen plenty in recent years where whales of all shapes and sizes (mainly orcas) have started barraging and sabotaging boats out in the middle of the ocean. And these are some big boats they are messing with, which is why you’ll never find me on a small vessel out at seas.
Especially after seeing this viral video.
Footage from Punta Arenas, Chile has spread across the internet this past week, and it’s pretty easy to see why everyone is captivated by this close call. A father and son were kayaking off the Chilean Patagonia when the son, Adrián Simancas, was briefly and terrifyingly swallowed by a humpback whale.
Adrián’s father, Dell Simancas, just so happened to have a camera rolling and pointed in the direction of his son when the massive humpback whale came out of the water, opened wide and sent the kayaker right into its mouth. It’s not out of the norm for humpbacks to breach out of the water, as they are extremely popular with whale watchers due to their tendency to jump out of the water and splash back down.
But it is rather rare for a whale to target a human and swallow one whole.
The scary part is that though it might not happen often, it’s very much a possibility logistically. Adult humpbacks are some of the largest creatures that call the ocean home, and they typically range from 39 to 52 feet in length and can weigh up to 40 tons. Thus, they’re very capable of chomping down on a small vessel like a kayak, and that’s exactly what this particular humpback whale did.
Adrián told the Associated Press that he wasn’t sure what had happened, initially but an overwhelming sense of dread came over him in the moment:
“I thought I was dead. I thought it had eaten me, that it had swallowed me.”
Fortunately for Adrián, the humpback whale evidently wasn’t hungry for humans that day. After the large sea creature engulfed the kayaker and took him underwater for a couple of seconds, the whale spit him right back out. It seems as though Adrián’s father wasn’t looking his direction when it happened, but quickly realized what was going on when he turned and saw the whale surfacing and his son soaked with water.
Luckily, the camera was pointed perfectly and captured it all.
Though Adrián realized he had just experienced and survived a brush with death, he knew that he and his father could potentially still be in danger. The kayaker told the AP that after he escaped the whale’s mouth alive, it only made him worry about death that much more:
“When I came up and started floating, I was scared that something might happen to my father too, that we wouldn’t reach the shore in time, or that I would get hypothermia.”
Amazingly, both the father and the son made it back to shore virtually unscathed… physically of course. I’m sure getting swallowed whole by a humpback whale will require a good amount of therapy to worth through mentally. But most importantly, both Adrián and Dell Simancas survived through the horrifying incident.
And they got it all on tape:
