That’s not krill. Photo: X//Screenshot
A video has emerged online that a father claims to have captured of his 24-year-old son getting swallowed and spat out by a humpback whale.
According to reports, Adrian Simancas and his father, Dell, were kayaking off the coast of Chile, near Punta Arenas on February 8. At around 3 p.m., a massive humpback surfaced within inches of Adrian’s kayak. Adrian and his boat ended up tipping into the whale’s mouth. Dell, who was nearby with one of the worst cameras ever created, apparently, filmed the whole thing. Thankfully, the whale wasn’t too interested in eating a human and a large chunk of plastic, so it spat both Adrian and the kayak back out.
“I thought I was dead,” Adrián told The Associated Press. “I thought it had eaten me, that it had swallowed me.”
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
The unlikely event happened in Bahía El Águila, near the San Isidro Lighthouse in the Strait of Magellan. Dell, who was holding the camera, was oddly relaxed about the whole thing.
“Stay calm, stay calm,” he told his son after he emerged from the whale’s mouth.
Adrian, by his own telling, wasn’t just worried about himself, but his dad too. “When I came up and started floating,” he continued, “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.”
Luckily, Adrian managed to get to Dell’s kayak and they both made it safely back to land — but with one hell of a story to tell.
Oddly, this isn’t the first time a humpback whale has had a run in with kayaks. In 2020, Julie McSorley and Liz Cottriel were likely a bit surprised when they ended up in the mouth of a humpback whale. The whale, of course, wasn’t attempting to eat them — whales generally don’t eat kayaks or humans — but was surfacing to devour a school of fish that were beneath the kayak. They too emerged unscathed.
