A humpback whale briefly swallowed a kayaker off Chilean Patagonia before quickly releasing him unharmed. The incident, caught on camera, quickly went viral.
On Saturday last week, Adrian Simancas was kayaking with his father, Dell, in Bahia El Aguila near the San Isidro Lighthouse in the Strait of Magellan when a humpback whale surfaced, engulfing Adrian and his yellow kayak for a few seconds before letting him go.
Dell, just meters away, captured the moment on video while encouraging his son to stay calm.
“Stay calm, stay calm,” he can be heard saying after his son was released from the whale’s mouth.
“I thought I was dead,” Adrian said. “I thought it had eaten me, that it had swallowed me.”
He described the “terror” of those few seconds and explained that his real fear set in only after resurfacing, fearing that the huge animal would hurt his father or that he would perish in the frigid waters.
Despite the terrifying experience, Dell remained focused, filming and reassuring his son while grappling with his own worry.
“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,” Adrian said.
After a few seconds in the water, Adrian managed to reach his father’s kayak and was quickly assisted. Despite the scare, both returned to shore uninjured.
The Strait of Magellan, about 3,000km south of the Chilean capital of Santiago, is a major tourist attraction in the Chilean Patagonia, known for adventure activities.
Its frigid waters pose a challenge for sailors, swimmers and explorers who attempt to cross it in different ways.
Although it is summer in the southern hemisphere, temperatures in the region remain cool, with minimums dropping to 4oC and highs rarely exceeding 20oC.
While whale attacks on humans are extremely rare in Chilean waters, whale deaths from collisions with cargo ships have increased in recent years, and strandings have become a recurring issue in the past decade.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees
RSS