Cape Cod fisherman OK after whale gulps him down, spits him out
Excerpt:
A Cape Cod fisherman is recovering after miraculously emerging without serious injuries from spending nearly a minute in the maw of a humpback whale who mistook him for a snack.
“I was lobster diving and a humpback whale tried to eat me,” fisherman Michael Packard wrote on Facebook.
This salty tale begins innocuously, with the 56-year-old sea captain Packard on Friday morning looking for lobsters near Provincetown, where he’s from. He dove into the ocean to check a trap — when a passing whale gulped him down.
“He was in a whale’s mouth for 30 to 40 seconds, and then he was spit out,” his mother, local painter Anne Packard, told the Herald on Friday afternoon.
Michael Packard, on his way out from the hospital just a few hours later, told a local TV reporter he thought that was it for him.
“I realized I’m in a whale’s mouth, and he’s trying to swallow me,” a shaken-sounding Packard told WBZ. “I thought to myself, ‘Hey, this is it. I’m going to die.’”
But happily, his physical recovery seems to be going swimmingly. Medical personnel had suspected he’d broken at least one of his legs, but it appears he escaped even that, his mother said.
“He doesn’t have any broken bones,” she said. “He’s terribly fortunate.”
...Humpback don’t actually eat people. Experts say this kind of behavior is essentially unheard of, and likely is just a freak incident — a fluke, if you will. There’s a pretty good chance no one outside of Nineveh-bound biblical figures can match Packard’s story.
Marine mammal expert Peter Corkeron of the New England Aquarium told the Herald that humpback whales are “gulp feeders” who eat by unhinging their mouths and taking big lunges through the water. And when you’re 50 feet long and weigh 30 tons, as humpbacks can, sometimes you don’t really have too much fine control over where you’re headed, he noted.
“They slurp up as much as they can, and then swallow it down,” he said, noting that he’s never heard of a human being scooped up like this. This one was probably looking to snatch up some fish when Packard ended up in just the wrong place at the wrong time.
++++!!!
Jonah bump.
Heads up Nineveh.
5.56mm