New York:
It sounds like a genuine-life take on “Pinocchio” — a US lobster fisherman says he was scooped into the mouth of a humpback whale Friday and however lived to inform the story.
“I was in his closed mouth for about 30 to 40 seconds before he rose to the surface and spit me out,” Michael Packard wrote on Facebook hours just after his brush with the depths.
“A humpback whale tried to eat me,” he added. “I am very bruised up but have no broken bones.”
Packard’s beyond-belief major fish yarn started, he told neighborhood paper Cape Cod Times, when he was diving for lobster off the coast of the northeastern state of Massachusetts.
“All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black,” he mentioned just after getting released from the hospital.
He was about 35 feet down (10 meters) and his initial believed was that he had been attacked by a shark, but the lack of teeth and clear wounds made him reconsider.
Packard mentioned he started to struggle — but as opposed to in the classic children’s tale “Pinocchio” there was no require to create a fire to safe his escape.
“I saw light, and he started throwing his head side-to-side and the next thing I knew I was outside (in the water),” Packard told the paper.
The story says Packard’s fishing mate Josiah Mayo “saw the explosion of water as the whale surfaced and Packard was ejected,” but does not include things like any quotes attributed to him.
Jooke Robbins, director of humpback whale research at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Massachusetts, mentioned she had no explanation to doubt the account.
“I didn’t think it was a hoax because I knew the people involved… So I have every reason to believe that what they say is true,” she told AFP.
Robbins mentioned she had in no way heard of an “accident” of this kind, but “it may be that he (Packard) was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“When they (whales) fish… they rush forward, open their mouth and engulf the fish and the water very quickly,” she mentioned, adding they have big mouths, but throats so narrow they would not be capable to swallow a human.
The whale, which according to Mayo’s description was on the young side, “may not be able to detect quickly enough that something is in the way.”
Even if all the information weren’t however recognized, one point was clear for Robbins: “It is important for people to be quite aware… And when they see a whale, keep a good distance. It’s really important to give whales their space.”
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