Posted on 06/11/2021 3:07:56 PM PDT by billorites
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 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.”
She said she’d just talked to him on the phone, and they didn’t get too far into what it’s like in a whale’s mouth.
But she did say, “He said he knew it was the end — he absolutely accepted it.”
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.
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(Excerpt) Read more at bostonherald.com ...
I’d change my name to Jonah.
A modern day Jonah!
Must have been a Democrat.
Amazing. I’d at least thought he’d be scarred from the animal’s stomach acids, or die of asphyxiation.
There’s a pretty good chance no one outside of Nineveh-bound biblical figures can match Packard’s story.
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Apparently this does happen now and then. Here isa video of a whale accidentally sniffing a couple of kayakers. They survived aft they were spat out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X2C46—2lY
That’s a moment neither he or the Whale will ever forget!
Good thing he wore his new Dr. Marten boots with spikes and studs.
The Whale must have thought he swallowed a porcupine.//
MAYBE IS JUST “SEEMED” LIKE 3 DAYS TO JONAH!
I bet he goes to preach to the Ninevites now.
The sea was angry that day my friends.
Dot think he made it that far in or down or whatever
Wow, I’m never going kayaking again.
Come listen to my tale....
a different twist to the fish got away stories...
Humpbacks are plankton eaters. Their gullet is about the diameter of a grapefruit. No danger of him seeing digestive juices unless the whale had a bad case of acid reflux.
He didn’t actually get swallowed. Neither did James Bartley.
Um no. They eat schools of small bait fish.
This story seems oddly familiar...
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