Rowing for busy waters under cloudy skies, Adrián Simancas and his father were practicing packrafting A few meters from each other when something huge came up, open mouth, from the waves below.
A jubart whale seemed to swallow Simancas, then rolled back to the waters of Chilean Patagonia.
Moments later, Simancas emerged back to the surface, followed by his boat the size of a kayak. The dark curve on the back of the whale came soon behind them, before the animal dive out of sight.
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Simancas’ father captured everything on video.
“I felt something to get me from behind-all this happened in a second-something dark blue or white wrapped me, and a viscous texture brushed my face,” Simancas said in an interview on Thursday night. “Then he closed completely and started sinking, and just closed my eyes, waiting for an impact. But instead, I felt like it was surrounded by water. I realized I was in the mouth of something and had been swallowed. ”
After a second or more, he said, “I started to feel the life jacket pulling me up and suddenly it was out again.”
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Simancas, 23, and his father, Dell, were practicing packagrafting – they emphasized that they were wearing portable and non -kayaks inflatable vessels – near the San Isidro headlight and Bahía El Águila, a camp in Patagonia.
Dell Simancas, 49, said he and his son, a computer engineering student, did many outdoor activities together and had planned the trip months in advance. The duo, who lives in Chile, finally set off for their four -day journey of walking and rafting last weekend, crossing Magalhães Strait towards an island near Cabo Froward.
“I turned on the camera to record the waves, and I heard a very loud sound behind me, like a big wave breaking,” Dell Simanas recalled. “I turned and couldn’t see Adrián or the boat anywhere. Suddenly I saw him emerge from the water along with what seemed to be an animal. ”
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He said he felt a squeeze of fear as soon as his son disappeared – and that his experience as an anesthetist helped him maintain the composure in the following moments. “Stay calm, calm down,” you can hear you say after your child reappeared on the surface.
“At the time, I didn’t know it was a whale,” said Adrián Simancas. “I managed to keep calm thanks to my father’s advice.”
Such meetings between whales and humans are extraordinarily rare, scientists say, and although Simancas told the Associated Press that it was “swallowed”, jubarts are filter feeding that eat small fish and krill. They are unable to swallow something as large as a person.
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“What I see in the video suggests to me that the rowing was just on the way for a whale to feed on the surface,” said Joake Robbins, director of the Jubarte Whale Study Program at the Massachusetts Coastal Studies Center. “My guess is that the whale was as surprised as the row,” he added.
Despite the improbability of Simancas’ experience, he is not the first person to have fallen into the mouth of a jubart or near her in recent years. In 2021, a fisherman of lobster diving on the coast of Massachusetts was caught in the mouth of a jubart, then was released to the surface with bruises to show.
Last year, a 30 -foot juvenile jubart became a 23 -foot motor boat on the coast of New Hampshire, playing two men in the water. And by 2020, a jubart jumping on the central coast of California lifted a kayak about 6 feet in the air, along with the two women inside it.
From the short video of Chile, “It’s hard to say what happened,” said Dianna Schulte, co -founder and research director of the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
“The jubarts often feed the way in the video, advancing to the surface with an open mouth to capture concentrated prey,” she wrote in an email. “Probably I didn’t know that the rowing was above it, especially given the cloudy conditions and the alleged concentration of prey.”
She added that the jubarts, which do not have biosonar or ecoLocalization, depend mainly on their hearing, and small, engine -free vessels, such as kayaks, make very little sound, “which again leads to the point that the whale didn’t know it was there . ”
Schulte said that with more prevalent cameras, it was hard to tell if such dates with whales were occurring more often or simply attracting more attention. In her opinion, she said, “These interactions are occurring more often as whales seem to be changing their food habitats closer to the coast in some areas, where whale/human interactions are more likely to occur.”
Adrián Simancas, who had never seen a whale before the last weekend, said he had no resentment. “If it happens again, I hope it’s not so close,” he said.
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