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'I was completely inside': Lobster diver swallowed by humpback whale
- HenryKissinger 5y agoThe ribs and terrors in the whale Arched over me a dismal gloom, While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by, And lift me deepening down to doom. ‘I saw the opening maw of hell, With endless pains and sorrows there; Which none but they that feel can tell— Oh, I was plunging to despair. — H. Melville
- tartuffe78 5y agoWe are two mariners, our ships' sole survivors In this belly of a whale Its ribs our ceiling beams, its guts our carpeting I guess we have some time to kill - The Mariner’s Revenge Song, The Decemberists
- cratermoon 5y agoThe water about me rose to my neck, for the deep was closing over me; seaweed twined about my head at the roots of the mountains; I was sinking into a world whose bars would hold me fast for ever.
- analog31 5y agoI'm betting the guy's going to get a nickname from this episode. ;-)
- Digory 5y agoJoe, nah.
- ashton314 5y agoOh man, I forgot I sang Jonah’s Song with the BYU Men’s Chorus until you posted those lines. I couldn’t find a recording of us singing it, but here is an excellent recording of another choir singing it: https://youtu.be/3FmjPpTqk3s https://youtu.be/3FmjPpTqk3s
- tinfoilheadsock 5y agofortunately didn't end up like this chap: https://theync.com/villagers-find-child-inside-of-a-crocodile.htm https://theync.com/villagers-find-child-inside-of-a-crocodil...
- JoshGlazebrook 5y agowarning: this link opens a bunch of spam including some pornographic pages.
- klipt 5y agoI guess he had a whale of a time!
- ronyeh 5y agoI still wouldn't want my entire body inside the mouth of another animal. Terrifying!
- vmception 5y agoI'd like to see you make that distinction when a 50 foot 30 ton beast is coming right at you How sure will you be then? "Ah its an accident, this animal's doesn't even eat humans and its throat is too sm---"
- MichaelZuo 5y agoWhat’s the purpose of your response? It clearly wasn’t meant as a claim that one can decide on matters of internal whale anatomy in a split second.
- vmception 5y agoIntrospection about a useless pedantic response that is also mentioned in the article, while the diver still thought he was never getting out
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- MichaelZuo 5y agoYou mean personal introspection on the comment you replied to, or what you believe the diver what would have thought in that moment?
- leephillips 5y agoThe night swallowed the day. I swallowed the novel in one night. She swallowed me whole; I was smitten. The child was swallowed by the huge overcoat. That’s how words work in our fun and rollicking language.
- dylan604 5y agoAfter the worst day of meetings, after not being to track down the most elusive bug, at the end of that day, I absolutely do not have to worry about being eaten whole. So I guess there are worse jobs.
- teeray 5y agoWell, unless you’re a developer at a certain theme park featuring genetically engineered creatures…
- sharkweek 5y agoDodgson!!
- rcpt 5y agoRepeating yourself until you're red in the face that they shouldn't reopen this park for a 3rd or 4th time until your team gets unit testing sorted out but the PMs just aren't having it and the deadline isn't going to budge
- VRay 5y agoI am totally unappreciated in my time. You can run this whole park from this room with minimal staff for up to 3 days. You think that kind of automation is easy? Or cheap? You know anybody who can network 8 connection machines and debug 2 million lines of code for what I bid for this job? Because if he can I'd like to see him try.
- aeortiz 5y agoIt's a Unix system...I know this!
- lelanthran 5y ago> Well, unless you’re a developer at a certain theme park featuring genetically engineered creatures… "It's a UNIX system. I know this!"
- ryan-allen 5y ago
- ballarak 5y ago"Ten years ago, while traveling in Costa Rica, he was a passenger in a small plane that crashed in the jungle, killing the pilot, co-pilot and a passenger. Packard sustained multiple serious injuries to his abdomen and upper body. The rescuers that found the remaining five passengers after two nights in the jungle said they wouldn’t have survived another night." This guy's luck is clearly maxed out. What a crazy pair of stories.
- soheil 5y agoI mean if you swim in whale's proximity and fly in sketch planes, crazy shit is bound to happen to you. The real tragedy is the stories there is no one left to tell. As always true wisdom is found in country songs: If the Phone Don't Ring, You'll Know It's Me -Rusty Ford -- My Truck, My Dog, and You
- ashtonkem 5y agoSwimming near whales isn’t unsafe at all. They’re not particularly aggressive, a lone human is too small to worry about, and we operate on completely different sections of the food chain. This was more akin to getting stepped on by a giraffe that didn’t see you there. Total accident.
- soheil 5y ago> Swimming near whales isn’t unsafe at all Ha! "I was completely inside" What else needs to happen for you to think there might be an element of being unsafe? The man was swallowed by a whale, I don't care if whales are aggressive or not, if anything can swallow me whole I consider that a bit unsafe. > This was more akin to getting stepped on by a giraffe that didn’t see you there. So you also consider hanging out near giraffes to be completely safe knowing they might accidentally step on you? That's a very interesting definition of safety. I think what you want to say is that animals like whales are friendly and we shouldn't harm them. Point taken.
- void_mint 5y ago
- geuis 5y agoI like to hope that cetaceans are sentient. Given that, I can imagine the poor whale being completely grossed out by whatever it just got in its mouth and tried to spit it out as fast as possible. I've definitely had that experience before.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y agoMouth full of scuba gear would be unpleasant.
- lamontcg 5y agoFor a scuba diver it is better than the alternative
- heavyset_go 5y agoThere are a lot of sentient animals, including all mammals that I'm aware of.
- Filligree 5y agoHe probably means 'sapient'.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sprusemoose 5y agotldr: Whale has gag reflex to seamen
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- maybelsyrup 5y agoThis is some Rime of the Ancient Mariner shit and I love it, salute to this utter king
- mindcrime 5y agoHear the rime of the ancient mariner See his eye as he stops one of three Mesmerizes one of the wedding guests Stay here and listen to the nightmares of the sea
- Maursault 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bartley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bartley See also: Geppetto, Jonah
- andrewflnr 5y agoOP is much more credible. The guy's story is exactly how you would expect a baleen whale to react to swallowing a human.
- harry8 5y agoMade up his home in That big fish ab-do-men It ain't necessarily so...
- mxcrossr 5y ago> Initially, Packard thought he was inside a great white shark, but he couldn’t feel any teeth and he hadn’t suffered any obvious wounds. Is a great white shark actually big enough that you could end up inside it’s mouth whole?
- staticassertion 5y agoI don't know the answer to this, but great whites are massive and definitely you could 'fit' a human in one just from a volume perspective. Whether you could fit into its mouth/throat, I don't know.
- randoramax 5y agoSharks have teeth, they bite and shred their prey. Sharks don't need to swallow you
- BrissyCoder 5y agoNot a grown man.
- JasonFruit 5y agoYou also might not be thinking that clearly if you had just been swallowed alive by a baleen whale. That he was reasoning with any clarity at all, in his situation, is impressive to me.
- Barrin92 5y agoI was relieved when the article said the esophagus was too small to actually be swallowed. Like what do you do if a whale actually swallows you, try to crawl out the other end? Like the Shawshank Redemption but way worse
- ashtonkem 5y agoTry to make it vomit I guess. You’d suffocate long before you get passed through.
- contriban 5y agoThe guy was diving, so it’s possible he had an oxygen tank. My guess is that in that case you’re even less likely to go through the animal though.
- travisjungroth 5y agoHe had a scuba tank. Most likely filled with air, maybe oxygen enriched air. Pure oxygen is dangerous below about 5 meters.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- abootstrapper 5y agoWoof. I hadn’t even considered, what if the whale dove while you were in it’s mouth before spitting you out! Rapid descent, the bends, oxygen narcosis. Not good! That guys is lucky he was spat out on the surface!
- travisjungroth 5y agoThis is why I only dive in caves.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
- yongjik 5y agoI wonder what the whale felt. Would it be swimming around telling its disgusted friends a cetacean equivalent of: "So I was just picking up strawberries in the backyard and all of a sudden this giant winged cockroach appears out of nowhere and before I know it that goddamn thing is in my mouth!!! Dammit I can still taste it. It's something you can't forget..."
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wccrawford 5y agoAnother article I read said that the whale deliberately surfaced, and that these whales typically get along with humans, so it's possible it was very aware of what was happening and was trying to save his life after it accidentally swallowed him. So I suspect the conversation was more about "I almost killed a human! Oh noes!"
- PicassoCTs 5y ago"They murdered half of our civilization the last time .. do not anger the strange boot-stompers within the metal carcasses on the surface."
- koheripbal 5y agoIt seems more likely that it was just trying to spit out some garbage. It's possible the whale doesn't have the ability to clean its mouth as well underwater?
- tzs 5y agoThe esophagus of that kind of whale is too small for human to get through, and it's not a toothed whale so it can't really chew its food to make it fit. It only wants to eat things that it can swallow whole. They are going to try to spit out anything they swallow that is bigger than their normal food. My guess would be that it surfaced because that means less water resistance when trying to shake the large non-food item out of its mouth. It may have been aware that it was a human, but I have some doubts. If it saw that a human (or really anything larger than it can eat) was amidst the prey it was about to make an eating pass on I'd expect it to either wait for the large thing and prey to separate or would switch to a different target. It would only try to eat that prey if it didn't see the human. When those whales start their eating run their eating apparatus expands to take in a lot of prey (they often eat schools of small prey). When it expands the whale can no longer see what is in front of it. Finding a human (or other large thing) in its mouth during/after a food run would come as a complete surprise to it. I doubt that its sense of feeling inside the mouth is sufficiently discerning to tell a human from any other similar sized animal or from an inanimate object. It may be smart enough to reason that there were humans in the general area and that it didn't see any other large animals and that it was an area that it knew didn't have any large inanimate objects and so infer that the thing it got most likely is a human, but I'd expect at that point it is too busy thinking "THERE'S SOMETHING BIG IN MY MOUTH!" and "HOW THE HECK DO I GET RID OF THIS!!!". Reasoning about what it was would come after it deals with that.
- enjrolas 5y agoAnother cameraman got gobbled by a Bryde's whale while he was filming a bait ball off the coast of South Africa a couple years ago. His wife took photos of him while he was half in the whale. Fortunately, the whale spat him out a few seconds later. As soon as he got out of the whale, he swam up to his wife to ask, "did you get it?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChcEb6mlEUo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChcEb6mlEUo (worth the watch)
- elliekelly 5y ago> As soon as he got out of the whale, he swam up to his wife to ask, "did you get it?" What has social media done to our brains that this is often the first thing people think to say after a near-death experience?
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y agoIs it a near death experience? It seems to me to be just a wild thing to happen. Maybe he didn’t perceive serious danger?
- jjk166 5y agoIf you find yourself inside an animal's mouth and you don't perceive serious danger then you have at least two problems.
- giarc 5y agoImages of man in mouth start at 1:03.
- fattypouch 5y agothe american dream
- yoloyoloyoloa 5y agoSounds like Jonah
- Wonnk13 5y agoNever thought I'd see the Cape Cod Times on HN!! The Center For Coastal Studies is a brilliant organization that does great work to defend this big critters, as well as Right Whales. I didn't realize there was still lobster so close to Stelwagon Bank- with the increasing acidity and warming waters folks have had to go closer to Maine for lobster. Anyhoo, humpbacks are our friends and no one should read this as an "attack"; just a little accident.
- drdavid 5y agoI didn't even realize that they were still diving for them. Here in Maine, they trap them. I don't know of anyone that still dives for them and don't think they do it much, if at all, here. (I don't live near the coast, but I do have a 'lobster guy' that hooks me up.)
- dylan604 5y ago>I didn't even realize that they were still diving for them. Here in Maine, they trap them. This sounds like a bit of New England banter. "Here in Maine, we use traps. The troglodites down the cape still dive for them."
- travisgriggs 5y agoMy wife read this to me 20 minutes ago. I kept waiting for the punchline. I was impressed with how straight faced she denied there was one. All the time my Dad humor brain is screaming "think fast think fast, what pun can you do with Jonah?" Coming up short AND finding there was no punchline was actually kind of a let down.
- soheil 5y agoSo a brother and sister claim he got swallowed by a whale and spit out seconds later and we just obviously believe them? Can someone shed more light on what evidence there is or any eyewitnesses attesting that this actually happened and that it isn't a prank by a couple of siblings reliving father Geppetto?
- mindcrime 5y agoWell, the article says that EMS transported him to the hospital, so it would seem likely that he had something happen to him, or if he'd been completely uninjured it would have raised red-flags either on scene, or later at the hospital. Beyond that, whether or not the event unfolded exactly as he described or not is something that probably only he (and the whale) will ever really know.
- soheil 5y agoI mean he does mention he didn't feel any teeth while inside and that's how he knew it wasn't a shark. So what wounds or physical signs would anyone expect to see in the hospital from being in a cushy whale mouth?
- rexreed 5y agoI've seen now a few comments online that say this whole thing is a hoax. Give it a few weeks to shake out.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y agoIt seems pretty unlikely to me, given that he said he’s lost multiple friends to great white sharks while he lived on the west coast. There are maybe 2-3 shark attack deaths per decade on the west coast, spread across a huge area. I have a hard time believing he was friends with multiple of them, and was in the described plane crash, and was gobbled by a whale.
- cambaceres 5y agoMisleading headline, he wasn't swallowed. Still an amazing story.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoMaybe the lobster diver was supposed to join Extinction Rebellion in Nineveh but rebelled against it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- tolbish 5y agoEveryone in this thread is making various pop culture references and I am here understanding none of them.
- conductr 5y agoI just chartered a whale watching tour out of Provincetown the day prior. Our Captain said there’s only been one humpback near by so far and we followed him/her around for a few hours. About half way through a few massive whale watching boats show up. I’ve been on a handful of tours like this before and know there are some rules in place but honestly it was shocking to me how aggressive those other boats were. The whale would surface and they would full throttle straight for it. Getting very close to hitting it in my view (although my perception is a little off around ocean things). Anyways, my family and the captain discussed it quite a bit. We even felt the whale was trying to “shake us” not long after those other boats began this behavior. Interesting that I’m back home in Texas today and seeing this article. I imagine the whale is just a bit tired of people everywhere he turns.
- ianhawes 5y agoI was on a whale watching tour years ago when the captain noticed a smaller boat tailing us. It appeared to be an affluent family that had chartered the boat to get a closer view of whales. Our captain would kill the engine when in the vicinity of a whale, and we would drift a bit. It was nice because it would get quiet and you could track their movements better. The boat tailing us wasn’t doing the same thing and came precariously close to several whales. The family had high powered cameras and could basically look over the edge and straight down at some of the whales we saw. Unfortunately for them they also broke federal law by being too close under their own power. As we headed home we saw the Coast Guard intercept them. Our Captain had radioed it in. He estimated they were hit with some hefty fines.
- conductr 5y agoThat’s essentially what they were doing, roles reversed us being the private charter. Our captain said something to the effect of “if I did that they’d report me” but I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t report them. It seemed to me those bigger boats were actually a threat to harming the whale. Our boat I think not so much (~39’) and we always jumped to the side of the whale whereas the bigger boats cut it off which in my mind increased the odds of a collision. Edit: found the boats based on their names https://whalewatch.com/ https://whalewatch.com/
- willyt 5y agoAnyone know why they dive for them instead of putting creels down? Not sure what creels are called elsewhere but they are like weighted traps that sit on the seabed attached to a line with a buoy at each end.
- aritmo 5y agoWhales have a small opening to their stomach. The best they can do, are objects smaller than a grapefruit. Therefore, a whale would not be able to consume a human.
- jfk13 5y agoFor the benefit of those who aren't familiar with Stanley Holloway's classic re-telling of the story, in best northern English music-hall tradition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBpttbTA908 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBpttbTA908 "Jonah and the Grampus"
- throwzaway20102 5y agoNow you know how it feels. Go vegan.
- throwzaway20102 5y agoWe eat fish all the time and nobody bats an eye. A whale eats a person and it’s a big deal? Humans and their hubris…
- serial_dev 5y agoIt's a case of "man bites dog" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog
- ryansc0tt 5y agoPretty much my biggest fear, right here! Always uneasy around big things in the watery abyss.
- andygreenwell 5y agoLiving on Cape Cod these days, I read “Burt Dow Deep-water Man” to my son fairly regularly when it’s time for bed. I think this guy just picked up a new nickname for himself.
- rendall 5y agoWe should spend some time discussing the name of his boat, the “Ja’n J”. First, what does it mean?