WATCH: Venezuelan kayaker recovering after being swallowed by whale

A Venezuelan kayaker is recovering from his ordeal after a huge humpback whale briefly scooped him up in its mouth off the coast of southern Chile before spitting him out unscathed in a dramatic incident caught on camera.

Adrian Simancas was in the water alongside his father last week when the whale surfaced and scooped him up in its mouth, a scene reminiscent of the Biblical story of Jonah.

‘I thought he’d swallowed me’

Five seconds later, a stunned Simancas bobbed to the surface as the whale’s dorsal again emerged above the frigid grey water.

“I thought he’d swallowed me!” Simancas exclaimed.

In a nearby kayak, Adrián’s father, Dell Simancas, watched in disbelief.

The pair had just crossed Eagle Bay — down the coast from Punta Arenas, Chile’s southernmost city —when he heard a crash behind him. “When I turned around.”

Watch the video of the whale scooping up Adrian

While not financially related, this is an unusual whale swallowing a kayaker and spitting them out. pic.twitter.com/VSiZQGmm8u

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) February 14, 2025

ALSO READ: Tourists urged to stay in cars after grandfather trampled by elephant

Viral video

The remarkable episode was caught on camera and quickly went viral after being posted on social media by his father, who can be heard shouting, “RELAX! RELAX!” to his understandably unrelaxed son.

“GRAB IT! GRAB IT!” the father adds, instructing his son to keep a hold of the kayak to stay afloat while the whale continues to swim behind him.

‘I thought it had eaten me’

The 24-year-old son told Chile’s TVN channel he saw something “blue and white passing close to my face, and it was like on one side and above me.

“I didn’t understand what was happening, and then I sank. I thought it had eaten me.”

Dell had fixed a camera to the back of his kayak to record the rising waves – which captured his son’s remarkable experience.

Watching the footage back, Adrián — who moved with his father to Chile from Venezuela seven years ago in search of a better quality of life — was shocked to see how enormous the whale had been.

For Adrián, the experience was not just about survival — he said he felt he had received a “second chance” when the whale spat him out.

‘Physically impossible to swallow’

Brazilian conservationist Roched Jacobson Seba told the BBC that Humpback whales have narrow throats, “about the size of a household pipe”, designed for swallowing small fish and shrimp. 

“They physically cannot swallow large objects like kayaks, tyres, or even big fish like tuna. Ultimately, the whale spit out the kayak because it was physically impossible to swallow,” he said.

ALSO READ: WATCH: Gatvol lion at Jamaica Zoo bites off man’s finger