(Lummi/Public/Cayetano Gros)
A father captured footage of the dramatic moment when a humpback whale swallowed his son off the shores of Chile before releasing him
The traumatic incident involving Dell Simancas and his son, Adrián, occurred Saturday in the Strait of Magellan, The Associated Press (AP) reported.
Adrián is seen in his yellow kayak when the footage opens. A humpback whale emerges and swallows him and the vessel in its maw. The whale lets him go seconds later.
“Stay calm, stay calm,” Dell urges his son in the video, according to The AP.
A terrifying incident caught on camera shows the moment a kayaker off the Chilean coast was swallowed by a humpback whale before being released unharmed. https://t.co/kaYSCeob5R pic.twitter.com/NLa4bj69Pn
— ABC News (@ABC) February 13, 2025
Adrián managed to make his way to his father and the two returned to shore unharmed.
“I thought I was dead,” he told the outlet. “I thought it had eaten me, that it had swallowed me.”
Adrián elaborated on the “terror” during the brief period of time between being swallowed and spat out, adding that he was more concerned after he reached the water’s surface. “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 added.
Whale attacks on humans off Chile are rare, though whale deaths have been mounting in recent years due to collisions with cargo ships, the AP reported. A Massachusetts lobster diver, Michael Packard, said in 2021 that he was briefly swallowed by a whale, according to the Cape Cod Times. He said he was probably in the whale’s maw between 30 and 40 seconds. His crewmate, Josiah Mayo, told him that the whale was medium-sized. Jooke Robbins, director of Humpback Whale Studies at Provincetown’s Center for Coastal Studies, implied that he suspected the incident was unintentional on the whale’s part.
