Rowing through the blurred waters under the cloudy sky, Adrián Simancas and his father packed only a few meters from each other when a slightly huge bang, his mouth open, from the waves below.
There was a hump of the whale pushed Mr. Simancas, then rolled into the waters of Chilean Patagonia.
A moment later, Mr. Simancas returned to the surface, followed by his ship size. The dark curve of the whale’s back appeared briefly behind them, then sank out of sight.
Mr. Simancas’s father caught the whole thing on the video.
“I felt something hit me from the back – it all happened in a second – something dark blue or white wrapped me up, and a slender texture brushing my face,” Mr. Simancas said in an interview on Thursday night. “Then it was completely closed and I started to sink, and I just closed my eyes, expecting the impact. But instead I felt like I was surrounded by water. I realized that I was in something in my mouth and that I ate.”
After a second or roughly, he said, “I started to feel the rescue jacket pulled me down, and then suddenly I came out again.”
Mr. Simancas, 23 years, and his father Dell, packed – they emphasized that they use portable, inflated crafts, not kayaks – near the lighthouse San Isidro and Bahía El águil, a camp in Patagonia.
Dell Simancas, 49, said that he and his son, a student of computer engineering, together performed many outdoor activities and planned their journey a few months ago. The couple, who lives in Chile, finally embarked on a four -day trip and rafting trip last weekend, moving to the Magella Strait to the island near Cape Froward.
“I turned on the camera to shoot the waves and heard a very loud sound behind me like a big wave,” Dell Simancas recalled. “I turned and couldn’t see Adrián or a boat anywhere. Suddenly I saw him get out of the water along with what looked like an animal.”
He said that he felt the torment of fear as soon as his son disappeared – and that his experience as an anesthesiologist helped him to keep calm in the moments that followed. “Stay calm, stay calm,” one can hear him say after his son reappeared on the surface.
“At the time, I didn’t know it was a whale,” Adrián Simancas said. “I managed to stay calm thanks to my father’s advice.”
Such meetings between whales and people are unusually rare, scientists say, and although Mr. Simancas told Associated Press that he “swallowed”, humps are filter investors who cannot swallow anything as big as a person.
“What I see in the video suggests that Kayaker was just on the road whale,” said Joke Robbins, director of the Humpback Whale Study Studies Program at Coastal Center, Massachusetts. “I suppose the whale was as surprised” as Rafter, she added.
Cileo’s environmental ministry called the incident “very unusual”, urging people to “maintain a prudent distance from marine life, especially whales, so as not to interfere with their behavior and to reduce the risk of people who suffer the accident.”
Fisheries Service in the country, Sernapesca, demanded similar precautionary measures, A warning that people could face a fine of a violation of Chile’s rules to get too close to animals, feed them or otherwise interfere with them.
“We want to strengthen security distances to ensure that we have obeyed behavior towards animals,” said Soldad Tapia, a national director of the Agency, adding that a case like a raft was never noticed in the strait of the Magellan region.
Despite Mr. Simancas’s incredible experience, he is not the first person to land in his mouth or nearby in recent years. In 2021. Jastog dived near the coast of Massachusetts caught in the mouth of a humpAnd then it was released, bruised, to the surface.
Last year, Grbav covered with a 23 -meter motorboat Off New Hampshire, sending two men to the water. And in 2020 breaching humps from California raised kayak about six meters into the airtogether with women in it.
From short videos from Chile, “It’s hard to say what happened,” said Dianna Schulte, co -founder and director of research at Blue Ocean Society to preserve the Marina in Portsmouth, NH
“The humps are often fed in a way that is seen in the video, filling on the surface with an open mouth to catch concentrated prey (small fish or wing),” Ue -Poruci wrote. “He probably did not know that kayak was above him, especially given the blurred conditions and the assumed concentration of prey.”
She added that the humps, which lack biozone or echolochy, rely primarily on their hearing, and small vessels without motoring like kayaks create very little sound, which suggests that “Kita did not know that he was there.”
Adrián Simancas, who had never seen a whale before last weekend, said he was not outraged. “If that happens again, I hope it’s not so close,” he said.
