The kayaker described what it was like being inside a whale’s mouth. Photos: TikTok//Screengrab
When Adrian Simancas climbed into his kayak to paddle through Chile’s stunningly beautiful Strait of Magellan, the last place he expected to end up was inside the mouth of a humpback whale. But inside the mouth of a humpback whale was exactly where he ended up, much to his surprise and the surprise of his father, who filmed the now-viral moment. In the wake of his one-in-a-million experience, Adrian has opened up about what it was like to be a real-life Jonah.
“I saw dark blue and white colors before feeling a slimy texture brush against my face,” the 24-year-old kayaker told the Guardian. “I closed my eyes to brace for impact, but it was soft, like being hit by a wave.”
When he realized what was happening, Simancas did the only thing he could possibly do in the strangest situation imaginable: he closed his eyes and held his breath.
“When its mouth closed around me and pulled me down, I felt like I was in a whirlpool, lying down and spinning around,” he continued. “If it had eaten me, I would’ve died. There was nothing I could do about it.”
Despite the fact that entering a whale’s mouth would cause one to assume that one was about to be eaten, ingestion wasn’t actually a real possibility. It was likely an accident that he ended up in the whale’s mouth, and within seconds, he was released from the humpback’s maw and floated back to the surface, thanks to his lifejacket. Amazingly, he was completely unharmed.
Dad films as his son is swallowed and then spit out by a whale pic.twitter.com/DxnJ8fLnn2
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) February 13, 2025
“Humpback whales have a small esophagus and feed on small prey (small fish, krill), so they could not ‘devour’ or ‘swallow’ a human,” María José Pérez Álvarez, a marine biologist at Universidad de Chile and Base Millennium Institute, explained to the Guardian. Since humpback whales don’t have teeth, getting chomped in half wasn’t physically possible, either. Baleen whales like humpbacks have a kind of sieve made of keratin inside their mouth that is used to filter water for food, like krill.
Although technically the whale couldn’t have chewed Simancas up and swallowed him, whales are still very, very big creatures. We, by comparison, are very, very small, and it wouldn’t be hard for a whale to accidentally maim or kill a person.
“A humpback whale is around 18 meters long,” Alvarez said. “It could have hit him hard with some part of its body, even if unintentionally, and the person could have been injured.”
While there are laws in Chile against coming too close to whales, Simancas and his dad deny that they meant to be in the path of the whale’s mouth. According to them, they didn’t know it was underneath them until it was very nearly on top of them.
“The sea was very calm. We were reaching the end of the bay when the whale appeared,” he said. “I didn’t see any schools of fish or any type of strange movements. The whale lunged from behind. It was a total surprise.”
