A commercial lobster diver who got caught in the mouth of a humpback whale off the coast of Cape Cod on Friday morning said he thought he was going to die.
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Michael Packard, 56, of Wellfleet, told WBZ-TV after he was released from Cape Cod Hospital that he was about 45 feet (14 meters) deep in the waters off Provincetown when "all of a sudden I felt this huge bump, and everything went dark."
He thought he had been attacked by a shark, common in area waters, but then realized he could not feel any teeth and he wasn't in any pain.
"Then I realized, oh my God, I'm in a whale's mouth ... and he's trying to swallow me," he said. "And I thought to myself OK, this is it – I'm finally – I'm gonna die." His thoughts went to his wife and children.
He estimates he was in the whale's mouth for about 30 seconds, but continued to breathe because he still had his breathing apparatus in.
Packard took to Facebook to share his story on a page called Provincetown Community Space.
"Hi everyone, I just want to clarify what happened to me today. I was lobster diving and a humpback whale tried to eat me. I was in his closed mouth for about 30 to 40 seconds before he rose to the surface and spit me out. I am very bruised up but have no broken bones. I want to thank the Provincetown rescue squad for their caring and help," he wrote.
"I could sense I was moving, and I could feel the whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth," he added. "I was completely inside; it was completely black," Packard further told the Cape Cod Times. "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."
Then the whale surfaced, shook its head, and spit him out. He was rescued by his crewmate in the surface boat.
His sister, Cynthia Packard, originally told the Cape Cod Times that her brother broke a leg, but he said later that his legs are just bruised.
Charles "Stormy" Mayo, a senior scientist and whale expert at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, told the newspaper that such human-whale encounters are rare.
Humpbacks are not aggressive and Mayo thinks it was an accidental encounter while the whale was feeding on fish, likely sand lance.
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