Back from depths: Fisherman says he was swallowed by humpback
NEW YORK: It sounds like a reallife take on “Pinocchio” - a US lobster fisherman says he was scooped into the mouth of a humpback whale on Friday and yet lived to tell the story.
“I was in his closed mouth for about 30 to 40 seconds before he rose to the surface and spit me out,” Michael Packard wrote on Facebook hours after his brush with the depths. “A humpback whale tried to eat me,” he added.
Packard’s beyond-belief big fish yarn began, he told local paper Cape Cod Times, when he was diving for lobster off the coast of the northeastern state of Massachusetts.
He was about 10m and his first thought was that he had been attacked by a shark, but the lack of teeth and obvious wounds made him reconsider.
Packard said he began to struggle - but unlike in the classic children’s tale “Pinocchio” there was no need to build a fire to secure his escape.
“I saw light, and he started throwing his head side-to-side and the next thing I knew I was outside (in the water),” Packard told the paper.
Jooke Robbins, director of humpback whale studies at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Massachusetts, said she had no reason to doubt the account.
“I didn’t think it was a hoax because I knew the people involved... So I have every reason to believe that what they say is true,” she told AFP.
Robbins said she had never heard of an “accident” of this type, but “it may be that he (Packard) was just in the wrong place at the wrong time”.