Cape Cod Lobsterman Has A Jonah Moment - Eaten By A Whale

Humpback whaleThe Guardian

Michael Packard is a lobster diver in New England, diving regularly off the coast of Cape Cod. He's been doing it for 40 years and is very experienced, but last Friday he had a scary experience for the first time when he ended up in the mouth of a feeding humpback whale.

He and his crew mate had taken their boat out off Herring Cove, and Packard was around 45 feet down off Race Point - in scuba gear, looking for lobsters as usual - when suddenly, everything went dark. At first, Packard assumed that he had been eaten by a shark. But then he realized that the mouth he was in had no teeth in it.

And then I realised: Oh my God, I'm in a whale's mouth and he's trying to swallow me. This is it, I'm going to die. - Michael Packard

Mr Packard has two sons, aged 12 and 15, and he says that at the moment of realizing he'd been eaten by a whale, he believed his life was over. He was still breathing air through the regulator of his scuba diving tank, but he was surrounded by the whale's baleen, and he knew that in size terms there was no way he'd be able to defeat the creature. He assumed everything was over.

Michael Packard, who escaped a whale's mouth last weekThe Guardian

I realized there was no overcoming a beast of that size. He was going to do with me what he wanted to do. He was going to spit me out or swallow me - Michael Packard

Humpback whales are enormous, bus-sized whales, growing up to 15 meters long and weighing 30+ tons. The one that decided Packard might make a tasty snack was, he presumes, a young one and after gulping him in, it changed its mind and spat him out again. It swam to the surface, breached the water, and threw its head around, chucking Packard out in the process. He was free, he was floating, and his crew mate (who'd been hunting keenly for bubbles from Packard's respirator while he was under) dragged him back into their boat.

Packard's experience, likened to Jonah's from the Bible story about the whale, is unlikely to have been motivated by any kind of attack on the whale's part. It was probably accidental, and the whale was as keen to spit him out as he was to get free. Humpback whales open their mouths wide to let tiny sea creatures - krill - filter through the baleen in their mouths, so it's likely that Packard was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time when that particular whale had its mouth open wide.

And it hasn't put him off lobster diving. He says he has no plans to give up his long career.

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