Paddling through choppy waters under cloudy skies, Adrián Simancas and his father were packrafting only a few yards away from each other when something huge lunged, mouth open, from the waves below.
A humpback whale appeared to gulp Mr. Simancas down, then rolled over into the waters of Chilean Patagonia.
Moments later, Mr. Simancas bobbed back up to the surface, followed by his kayak-sized vessel. The dark curve of the whale’s back briefly emerged behind them, then the animal dived out of sight.
Mr. Simancas’s father caught the whole thing on video.
“I felt something hit me from behind — all this happened in a second — something dark blue or white enveloped me, and a slimy texture brushed my face,” Mr. Simancas said in an interview on Thursday night. “Then it closed completely and I started to sink, and I just closed my eyes, expecting an impact. But instead I felt as if I was surrounded by water. I realized that I was in something’s mouth and I had been eaten.”
After a second or so, he said, “I began to feel the life jacket pulling me up and then suddenly I was out again.”
Mr. Simancas, 23, and his father, Dell, had been packrafting — they emphasized that they were using portable, inflatable craft and not kayaks — near the San Isidro Lighthouse and Bahía El Águila, a campground in Patagonia.
Dell Simancas, 49, said that he and his son, a computer engineering student, did many outdoor activities together, and that they had planned their trip months in advance. The pair, who live in Chile, finally set out on their four-day trek and rafting trip last weekend, heading out through the Strait of Magellan for an island near Cape Froward.
“I turned the camera on to record the waves, and I heard a very loud sound behind me like a big wave breaking,” Dell Simancas recalled. “I turned around and couldn’t see Adrián or the boat anywhere. Suddenly I saw him emerge from the water along with what looked like an animal.”
He said that he felt a pang of fear as soon as his son vanished — and that his experience as an anaesthetist helped him keep his composure in the moments that followed. “Stay calm, stay calm,” he can be heard saying after his son reappeared at the surface.
“At the time, I didn’t know it was a whale,” Adrián Simancas said. “I was able to stay calm thanks to my dad’s advice.”
Such encounters between whales and humans are extraordinarily rare, scientists say, and although Mr. Simancas told The Associated Press he had been “swallowed,” humpbacks are filter feeders that eat small fish and krill. They are incapable of swallowing anything as large as a person.
“What I see in the video suggests to me that the kayaker was just in the way of a surface feeding whale,” said Jooke Robbins, director of the Humpback Whale Studies Program at the Center for Coastal Studies, in Massachusetts. “My guess is that the whale was just as surprised” as the rafter, she added.
Despite the improbability of Mr. Simancas’s experience, he is not the first person to have landed in or near a humpback’s mouth in recent years. In 2021, a lobsterman diving off the coast of Massachusetts was briefly caught in a humpback’s mouth, then was released, bruised, to the surface.
Last year, a 30-foot-long juvenile humpback capsized a 23-foot motorboat off the coast of New Hampshire, sending two men into the water. And in 2020, a breaching humpback off the Central Coast of California lifted a kayak about six feet into the air, along with the two women inside it.
From the short video from Chile, “it is difficult to tell what happened,” said Dianna Schulte, a co-founder and director of research at the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation in Portsmouth, N.H.
“Humpbacks often feed in the manner seen in the video, by charging to the surface with their mouth open to capture concentrated prey,” she wrote in an email. “It likely did not know the kayaker was above it, especially given the cloudy conditions and the assumed concentration of the prey.”
She added that humpbacks, which lack biosonar or echolocation, rely primarily on their hearing, and small, motorless vessels like kayaks make very little sound, “which again leads to the point that the whale did not know it was there.”
Ms. Schulte said that with cameras more prevalent, it was hard to say whether such whale encounters were taking place more frequently or simply garnering more attention. In her view, she said, “these interactions are occurring more frequently as whales seem to be shifting their feeding habitats closer to shore in some areas, where whale/human interactions are more likely to occur.”
Adrián Simancas, who had never seen a whale before last weekend, said he harbored no resentments. “If it happens again, I hope it isn’t quite so close up,” he said.
