Kayaker Briefly Swallowed by Whale

Adrian Simancas was only in a whale's mouth for around a second but it felt like much, much longer. On a kayaking trip with his father in the Strait of Magellan off southern Chile to celebrate his 23rd birthday, Simancas and his kayak were briefly swallowed by a surfacing humpback whale, People reports. He escaped unharmed. The incident last Saturday was captured on video from a camera attached to his father's kayak. In the video, his father, just a few feet away, can be heard encouraging Simancas to stay calm, the AP reports.

Simancas was able to reach his father's kayak and they made it back to shore. "I thought I was dead," Simancas tells the AP. "I thought it had eaten me, that it had swallowed me." He tells the BBC that they had been kayaking for around two hours when he "felt something hit me from behind, closing in on me and sinking me." "I managed to see a dark blue and white color. I felt a slimy texture, which touched my face," he says. "At that moment, I closed my eyes expecting an impact, but I felt more like I was flipped over, not hit, and that's when I lay down."

He says in the brief moment he was in the whale's mouth, he "thought about the possibility of surviving inside the whale like Pinocchio." He says that after it spat him out and he rose to the surface, he realized that it wasn't a predator, but was worried it could do the same thing to his father's kayak, "whether out of curiosity or just to play." He tells the BBC he has reflected on the experience and decided to appreciate it. "Not only to see how to get something positive out of something negative, but to see it in its entirety as what it is, which is a unique experience, an encounter with wildlife in a region at the end of the world." (More humpback whale stories.)