Imagine planning a peaceful kayaking trip with your dad, only to end up inside the mouth of a humpback whale. For one adventurer in Chilean Patagonia, this jaw-dropping moment wasn’t a fish tale — it was a very real, very slimy reality check.
Adrián Simancas and his father, Dell, were enjoying a day on the Strait of Magellan’s chilly waters near the San Isidro Lighthouse when their tranquil paddle took a wild turn. A humpback whale, stretching up to 60 feet long and weighing as much as 40 tons, surfaced beneath Adrián’s kayak, engulfing him in its massive mouth. Dell, paddling just meters away, captured the heart-stopping scene on camera as his son — and his bright yellow kayak — vanished into the whale’s jaws.
A humpback whale rises in front of Adrián Simancas. Photo from video by Dell Simancas
“I thought I was dead,” Adrián said in Spanish, recalling the crazy experience. “I thought it had eaten me, that it had swallowed me.” The young kayaker described the disorienting sensation of being submerged, his face pressed against something slick and unfamiliar. “When I turned around, I felt on my face like a slimy texture; I saw colors like dark blue, white, something approaching from behind that closed… and sank me,” he said.
At that moment, I thought there was nothing I could do.”
Initially, Adrián worried the culprit might be a killer whale, a fear fueled by earlier conversations. “We had been talking about orcas shortly before, so I had that in my head,” he said. Fortunately, the humpback released him within seconds, leaving him drenched but unharmed. As Adrián resurfaced, his panic shifted to concern for his father. “I was scared that something might happen to my father too, that we wouldn’t reach the shore in time, or that I would get hypothermia,” he said.
A humpback whale briefly swallowed Adrián Simancas. Photo from video by Dell Simancas
Dell, meanwhile, stayed remarkably composed, urging his son to remain calm. “Stay calm, stay calm,” he can be heard saying in the video, his voice steady despite the chaos. The duo quickly reunited, with Dell helping Adrián back to safety. Reflecting on the encounter, Adrián now believes the whale meant no harm. “It was probably out of curiosity that the whale approached me,” he said, “or maybe to communicate or something.”
The Strait of Magellan, a rugged tourist hotspot known for its icy waters and adventurous spirit, rarely sees such close encounters. While humpbacks — a species protected under the Endangered Species Act — typically snack on krill, this one seemingly craved a brief kayak inspection. Though collisions with ships and strandings have risen in recent years, interactions with humans remain rare.
Adrián’s story joins a quirky list of whale-related mishaps. In 2020, two women off California’s coast found themselves in a humpback’s mouth, though they, too, emerged unscathed. “Because we had our life jackets on, as soon as the whale let us out of its mouth, we popped up to the surface,” one of the women, Julie McSorley said.
