Incredible new video of a humpback whale briefly closing its jaws around a kayaker off the coast of Chile (he was unhurt) is welcome news to Michael Packard, who says the new video is vindication — the lobster diver had a lot of doubters when nearly the same thing happened to him off Cape Cod in 2021.
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Incredible new video of a kayaker being gobbled up by a humpback whale off coast of Chile is shocking — though perhaps less so to Michael Packard, the Cape Cod lobster diver who went through something very similar in 2021.
Packard was hurt when when he was improbably engulfed by, then spit out, by a humpback whale while diving.
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"I'm vindicated!" he told NBC10 Boston Friday, after the new whale encounter. "There were so many doubters out there."
In the latest incident, the whale breaches the water's surface around a man in a yellow kayak, which vanishes under the waves. The incident was got on camera by his father, who can be heard yelling at his son in Spanish to stay calm and grab his kayak. The kayaker ended up unharmed.
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Asked about the incident while on vacation, Packard told us, "I thought, well, there you go. It can happen."
He noted that, of course, "it brought back the scary memories" — for a moment he thought a great white shark had eaten him, then realized it didn't have teeth. But he was worried he could be stuck inside the coffin-like mouth until he ran out of air.
But the whale spit him out, just like the man in Chile. His knee was dislocated, and he had soft tissue damage, but he was still back in the water within weeks.
His whale of a tale is the subject of a documentary, and while he's happy the kayaker made it out alive, he's saying this situation is like an I-told-you-so to all the nay-sayers.
"I thought of it as, 'Local experts have said these encounters are rare and the swallowing is accidental, as these humpbacks are not aggressive animals,'" Packard said.
The coverage of the Chile incident brought up something else that "still drives me crazy to this day," he noted: the word "swallowed" in all the coverage of what happened to him.
More on Michael Packard's whale encounter off Cape Cod
Humpback whales eat tiny fish, and their throats are only the size of grapefruits, so he wasn't actually swallowed by the animal, Packard said, suggesting "engulfed" as a better term.
"We were both engulfed in the giant jaws of a whale, which is pretty darn scary," he said.
