This was one whale of a tale.
Astonishing footage captured the moment a kayaker was swallowed whole by a humpback whale off Chilean Patagonia for a few seconds — before he was miraculously spit back out.
Adrian Simancas was kayaking in the Strait of Magellan in Bahía El Águila last Saturday when the beast emerged from the water and easily devoured the young man and his yellow kayak, according to video incidentally captured by his father, Dell, who was trailing behind.
“I thought it had already eaten me and swallowed me,” he told the Associated Press.
“Yes, at first I thought I had died,” Adrian added. “It was like, of course, a lot of terror because I thought no, no, there was nothing I can do.”
After he was freed from the whale’s mouth, his father can be heard telling his son to stay calm. But a new fear quickly emerged.
“When I came up and started floating, 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,” Adrián said.
He was seen on video swimming in the frigid water over to his father’s kayak and the two were able to safely make it to shore.
Adrian said he thought a killer whale might have swallowed him, but when he was released he thought “it was probably out of curiosity that the whale had approached me or maybe to communicate something.”
The Strait of Magellan, which is 1,600 miles south of Chile’s capital, Santiago, draws throngs of tourists ready for adventure.
Whale attacks on humans are exceedingly uncommon, though whales that collide with cargo ships have spiked in recent years.