Whale swallows, then spits out kayaker as moment is captured on camera; WATCH viral video

A humpback whale briefly swallowed a young kayaker before spitting him out around Chile’s southernmost region of Patagonia last week.

A video of the incident, caught on the phone camera of the kayaker’s father, has since gone viral.

Adrian Simancas, 24, and his father, 49, had been out on a kayaking excursion in the Strait of Magellan when the bizarre incident occurred.

The video shows the whale suddenly surfacing, engulfing Adrian and his yellow kayak for a few seconds, before letting him out. “Stay calm, stay calm,” his father can be heard saying in Spanish.

Speaking to The Associated Press, Adrian described the terror he felt during the incident.

“I thought I was dead,” he told the news agency. “I thought it had eaten me, that it had swallowed me.

“When I turned around, I felt on my face like a slimy texture; I saw colors like dark blue, white, something approaching from behind that closed…and sank me,” he told CNN in a separate statement. “At that moment, I thought there was nothing I could do, that I was going to die, I didn’t know what it was.”

Adrian quickly managed to reach his father’s kayak and the duo returned to the shore uninjured.

Humpback whale swallows kayaker off Chile before releasing him. pic.twitter.com/UuUatMGUxN

— The Associated Press (@AP) February 13, 2025

Even though the incident is remarkable, there is a simple reason why the kayaker wasn’t eaten up by the whale.

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

"Ultimately, the whale spit out the kayak because it was physically impossible to swallow."