Open Post: Hosted By The Lobster Diver Who Got Trapped In The Mouth Of A Humpback Whale
A fisherman almost perished in the deep blue Atlantic last Friday when a humpback whale (accidentally?) scooped him up into its four-foot-wide mouth! 56-year-old Michael Packard was diving for lobsters off of Cape Cod when he felt a big bump. Suddenly, he was engulfed in darkness, cuz bitch was in a whale’s mouth. After about 30 to 40 seconds, Michael saw the light (he didn’t die, the whale had kindly breached the surface), and he was spat back out. Michael’s mate Josiah Mayo witnessed the incident, retrieved his friend, and called for help. Except for a few bruises, Michael is fine. As for the whale, it was just pissed Michael wasn’t squid, krill, or salmon.
Michael posted about his adventure on the Provincetown Community Space Facebook page:
I was lobster diving and A humpback whale tried to eat me.I was in his closed mouth for about 30 to 40 seconds before he rose to the surface and spit me out.I am very bruised up but have no broken bones.I want to thank the Provincetown rescue squad for there caring and help.
“All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black,” Packard recalled Friday afternoon following his release from Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis.
“I could sense I was moving, and I could feel the whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth.”
Michael says he thought he was inside a great white shark, but he didn’t feel any teeth and he couldn’t detect any wounds on his body. That’s when he realized he’d gone full Pinocchio; he was inside a whale:
“I was completely inside; it was completely black,” Packard said. “I thought to myself, ‘there’s no way I’m getting out of here. I’m done, I’m dead.’ All I could think of was my boys — they’re 12 and 15 years old.”
Michael started struggling around in his scuba gear, and the whale didn’t like that. It started shaking its head back and forth, breached the surface, and flung Michael back out into the sea. Here’s a news report about Michael’s adventure:
Expert Jooke Robbins tells the Cape Cod Times that the whale likely made a mistake. When a humpback opens its mouth to feed, it blocks the animal’s vision. So it probably didn’t know it was scooping up a Michael. Although Michael could have died of injuries, he wasn’t in any danger of being swallowed; unlike a sperm whale (that’s the Moby Dick one), a humpback’s esophagus is small and couldn’t fit a human.
OR, and here’s a totally different theory… the whale knew exactly what it was doing. Hear me out. A family of lobsters paid the whale (in krill) to get rid of Michael, the man who keeps diving down the ocean floor and kidnapping their kin. A failed ocean hit!