From breitbart.com
A kayaker in Chile became a modern-day Jonah on Saturday when a humpback whale decided to approach him.
The incident happened off Chilean Patagonia when 24-year-old Adrián Simancas was kayaking with his father, Dell, in the Strait of Magellan, CBS News reported Friday.
His father was recording from not far away when the whale came out of nowhere and swallowed his son and his yellow kayak.
Video footage shows the moment the whale surfaced and Simancas disappeared inside the creature’s mouth. Seconds later, the whale released Simancas, who tried to get his bearings after such an intense few moments:
He later said, “I thought I was dead. I thought it had eaten me, that it had swallowed me.” During the incident, his father is heard telling him to stay calm. When Simancas emerged from inside the whale’s mouth, his kayak was also seen popping up out of the water.
The young man said he could barely believe it when the whale came near to him, El Pais reported Friday.
“At first, I thought it had swallowed me whole, although I didn’t really know what it was, and then, when I got back to the surface, I realized it was a whale,” he recalled.
“I also knew that there wasn’t that much danger, unless it started jumping or knocked my dad off his boat, because then it would be very difficult for us to get back to shore,” he added.
The El Pais report noted:
Humpback whales, which can weigh up to 48 tons and measure 19 meters in length in the case of females, feed on plankton, plants, and fish. They have a small throat, which makes it difficult for a human body to reach their stomach. They rarely attack humans and are known for being one of longest-traveling species in the world.
In 2017, another man had a close call with a whale while he was kayaking, according to video footage from The Dodo.
The clip shows just how large the creatures are:
After the frightening brush with the humpback whale, Simancas and his father returned to shore safe and sound, although a little shaken.
The story is reminiscent of the Book of Jonah in the Bible when the prophet was swallowed by a whale and later spit back on land.
I’m jolly glad that the whale let him go, and that he was fine afterward — his father too 🙂
As for it being a whale that swallowed Jonah, the Bible says that God prepared a ‘great fish’, and whales are a marine mammal, not a fish, so it actually most likely wasn’t a whale. I don’t mean to be picky; but as God inspired the Bible, it is infallible, and so I often think when the story of Jonah comes up, and whales get mentioned, that it is probably the human mind looking at possibilities that makes people think, ‘oh, it had to be a whale, of course: what else in the sea could swallow a man whole?’, when the Bible says that God prepared a great fish. The word prepared might even mean that God didn’t just look for a huge fish, but actually made one especially. I just think that if God meant a whale, he would have had ‘whale’ written in His Word 🙂
I wonder what the Hebrew and Greek is for the word “Fish” in that passage of Scripture? I should research that!
Strong’s Hebrew 1709 dag- fish 1419 gadol- great Jonah 1:17
Strong’s Greek 2785 ketos- great fish Mt. 12:40
Yes, absolutely! And thank you very much, Mark, for doing that — my copy of Strong’s is rather buried with moving books around just now, so I can’t easily dig it out for a day or so.
It is good to see the translators did a good, accurate job with the great fish 🙂
AMEN!
This was shown on T.V. and its still hard to believe he survived. Jonah in real life for sure. Wow.
Yes! Incredible!!
I think I would have died from the bad breath alone.
LOL!
I think a fisherman could spin the 1st vid into a real fish tale. The guy has his spinning rod & line out & “hooks” the big one that clearly “got away”. Better if the vid arrow is eliminated so the reader can’t see “the rest of the story”.
Agree!