In an astonishing moment caught on camera, a humpback whale briefly scooped up a kayaker in its mouth before quickly spitting the man back out.
Adrián Simancas was kayaking with his father, Dell Simancas, last Saturday in Chilean Patagonia when the whale surfaced, trapping the young man and his watercraft in its mouth for a few seconds before releasing him.
“I thought I was dead,” Adrián told the Associated Press, saying he initially thought he was being attacked by an orca. “I thought it had eaten me, that it had swallowed me.”
His father, who captured the whole incident on camera, can be heard coaching his 24-year-old son after the massive animal released him.
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“Stay calm, stay calm,” his father said from behind the lens.
The harrowing encounter happened in Bahía El Águila, near the San Isidro Lighthouse in the Strait of Magellan.
And while Adrián said he felt “terror” for the first few seconds while he was in the whale’s mouth, the true fear set in after he was released. He told AP he was worried he might die in the icy waters or that the animal would turn on his father next.
“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,” he said.
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He was able to quickly make it over to his dad’s kayak and climb aboard before the two paddled back to shore, shaken but uninjured.
While whale attacks on humans are extremely rare in Chilean waters, whale deaths from collisions with cargo ships have increased in recent years, and strandings have become a recurring issue in the last decade.
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