‘I thought I was dead’: Kayaker scooped up into humpback whale’s mouth

Humpback whale in water
Whale scoops up kayaker FILE PHOTO: A humpback whale scooped up a kayaker in its mouth. (Loren Elliott/Getty Images)

A terrifying moment was caught on video when a man kayaking off the coast of Chile was scooped up in the mouth of a humpback whale.

Adrián Simancas was boating with his father Dell near San Isidro Lighthouse in the Strait of Magellan. Dell was recording video when a large humpback whale surfaced under his son’s boat. The whale took Adrián in its mouth and went back underwater, The Washington Post reported.

“When I turned around, I felt on my face like a slimy texture; I saw colors like dark blue, white, something approaching from behind that closed… and sank me,” he told CNN en Español. “At that moment, I thought there was nothing I could do, that I was going to die, I didn’t know what it was.”

A moment later Adrián Simancas surfaces as he said he felt his life vest “pull me up and then two seconds later I was back on the surface and then started understanding what happened,” he told CNN.

“I thought I was dead. I thought it had eaten me, that it had swallowed me,” he told The Associated Press.

He then grabbed his kayak, swimming to his father who told him to remain calm.

The younger Simancas also thought the whale was going to hurt his father or that he would die in the cold water.

“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,” Adrián Simancas told the AP.

Amazingly he nor his father were hurt, the AP reported.

The father and son duo said the incident would not keep them from the water, and that they would “of course” go back to kayaking, CNN reported.

Wildlife experts said the whale was probably lunge-feeding on krill or fish and wasn’t targeting Adrián Simancas

“The gentleman happened to be very close to the whale that was just going about feeding behavior. The man was not swallowed,” Vanessa Pirotta told CNN.

“These animals are not targeting human-sized prey. They don’t have the equipment to do what they need to do in order to devour a human,” she added.


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