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Humpback whales tend to be pretty low on the list of animals you have to worry about encountering if you’re out in the open ocean. However, one guy in Chile would probably beg to differ after he was briefly swallowed by one before it promptly spit him out while he was kayaking with his dad—who captured the entire ordeal.
Orcas roaming the waters near the Iberian Penninsula have spent the past few years terrorizing the hundreds of vessels that have been targeted in a spree of attacks, but that’s really the only species of whale that has a reputation for going out of its way to hassle humans on a regular basis.
However, it goes without saying there are plenty of things that can go wrong when you end up in the vicinity of an aquatic creature that weighs tens of thousands of pounds and frequently leaps out of the water without warning while making its way around the ocean—a characterization that describes whales of the humpback variety.
Last year, a boat capsized off the coast of New Hampshire courtesy of a humpback that landed directly on the stern after breaching, an incident that didn’t transpire too far from the spot where a lobster diver was momentarily swallowed by one while fishing off of Cape Cod in 2021.
While that second encounter wasn’t captured on camera, another that recently unfolded in Chilean waters off the coast of Argentina was courtesy of a father who was filming his son during a kayaking excursion before things took an insane turn.
According to The Associated Press, Adrián Simancas was paddling alongside his dad Dell in the Strait of Magellan last Saturday when a humpback surfaced directly below before swallowing him and his kayak for a few seconds before he was ejected back into the chilly waters.
Adrián told the outlet “I thought I was dead. I thought it had eaten me, that it had swallowed me” before realizing that was not the case, and his dad quickly paddled over while urging him to stay calm before he climbed onto the kayak prior to making their way back to the shore.
He emerged unscathed (aside from the potential long-term psychological damage that can undoubtedly stem from being gobbled up by a whale), and if his friends don’t start calling him “Jonah,” he probably needs to start finding a new group of people to hang out with.