Kayaker Swallowed by Whale Details Inside of Creature's Mouth

Yahoo

16-02-2025

Originally appeared on E! Online
Call him Adrián, who was swallowed by a whale and lived to tell the tale.
Adrián Simancas was kayaking off the coast of southern Chile with his dad Dell Simancas earlier this month when giant humpback whale surfaced and briefly caught him—and his kayak—in its mouth before spitting him out, unharmed. The 24-year-old's father had filmed the incident and the video has gone viral.
In a new interview, Adrián described what it was like being scooped up inside the creature's mouth, nothing that he didn't know at first that it was a whale.
"Suddenly, I felt like, a wave struck me from behind," he told CNN in an interview released Feb. 13. "But it was very, very heavy to be anything like that. So when I turned around, I saw some blue, dark colors and white flashing right through my face and I felt a slimy texture in my cheek. And then it shut down on me and took me underwater."
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Adrián said he guessed he was "inside something's mouth" but didn't know it was a whale. And the experience brought to mind a certain Disney film.
"It was just a second but it felt like more time because I was thinking a lot of stuff. I remembered about Pinocchio," he said, referring to the 1940 animated film, which sees its hero swallowed by a giant sperm whale named Monstro. "It was surprising. I wasn't expecting that at all."
Adrián said he could have lost his life had he been swallowed by a different creature.
"At first, I thought that I would die because there's nothing I can do if I am inside the mouth of a giant fish. But it was a whale," he said. "So I didn't have enough time to realize that I was not in danger."
These incidents involving humpback whales are rare. In 2021, American lobster diver Michael Packard was swallowed briefly by one as well.
'All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black," he told the Cape Cod Times. "I could sense I was moving, and I could feel the whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth."
He said that after less than a minute of being in pitch blackness, "I saw light, and he started throwing his head side to side, and the next thing I knew I was outside."
Ultimately, it is scientifically impossible for a humpback whale to fully swallow a human, although it can easily fit one inside its huge mouth, which can reach around 10 feet, according to Nicola Hodgins of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation, a U.K. nonprofit.
The reason? A humpback's throat is roughly the size of a human fist, she told National Geographic in 2021, and can only stretch to about 15 inches in diameter.
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