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Orgo-Life the new way to the future Advertising by AdpathwayA kayaker named Adrián Simancas was swallowed by a humpback whale while off the coast of Chilean Patagonia before resurfacing unharmed, saying, “I thought I had died.”
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The ocean can be a terrifying place.
That thought became a reality on Feb. 8 when kayaker Adrián Simancas was paddling off the coast of Chile and a humpback whale suddenly breached the surface and swallowed him whole.
In footage captured by his dad Dell, the whale caught Adrián in its mouth and took him below the surface for a few seconds before he miraculously emerged unharmed.
“At first I thought I had died,” Adrián told the Associated Press in an interview published Feb. 13. “I thought it had already eaten me and swallowed me. It was, of course, a lot of terror because I thought there was nothing I could do.”
But as the Chilean native tread water, guided by his dad’s encouragement to remain calm, Adrián’s fear wasn’t just for his own safety.
“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.”
After the horrifying incident in the Strait of Magellan, the kayaker reflected on the thoughts he had during the attack.
“I felt that maybe it was a killer whale,” he explained. “We had been talking about orcas shortly before, so I had that in my head. But when I got out I understood that it was probably out of curiosity that the whale had approached me or maybe to communicate something.”
A humpback whale briefly swallowed a kayaker off Chilean Patagonia before quickly releasing him unharmed. pic.twitter.com/DnbbT4Di7I
— The Associated Press (@AP) February 13, 2025While Adrián’s story is certainly harrowing, he’s not the only one who experienced a whale encounter in recent years. Since 2019, there have been about 700 run-ins with orcas near the Iberian Peninsula resulting in the sinking of six boats, according to Atlantic Orca Working Group-GTOA scientists that monitor the species, per NBC News.
“Of course they can sink you,” fisherman Manuel Merianda told the news organization in September. “We are the ones who are in their habitat. We are the ones who don’t have to be there.”
(E! and NBC News are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)
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