Completely black.
We surf fans are treated, regularly, to such wonderful videos of impossibly deep barrel rides. Surfers becoming covered up, so profoundly, that it seems likely they will never see the light of day again. Surfers becoming one in the belly of a beast.
Oh, not a literal “beast” as the ocean is our friend etc., but a lobster diver out looking for nummies on warm a early summer day got swallowed whole by a whale and lived to tell the tale.
Michael Packard was just off his boat, Friday morning, heading down to Cape Code’s floor when a humpback whale gobbled him right up. “All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black,” Packard told The Cape Cod Times Friday afternoon following his release from Cape Cod Hospital. “I could sense I was moving, and I could feel the whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth.”
The 56-year-old father of two thought he may have been sucked down by a Great White, as he sees them regularly, but didn’t feel teeth or anything overtly nasty so surmised he must be inside a barrel.
“I was completely inside; it was completely black. 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.”
Unlike Great Whites, though, whales have warm hearts, feelings, and Packard could tell his movement was making the mammal sad and so kept moving and moving until his new friend moved back to the surface and spit him out.
It is the first known incident of whale of whale swallowing man since the time of Jonah.
Packard suffered no broken bones and is excited to dive again soon.
A happy ending much like Nathan Florence in Nias.
Very cool.
