(TheIndependentStar.com) – In the Bible, there is a well-known story about Jonah and a whale. Jonah was thrown to sea after a particularly bad boat ride with some less-than-friendly men, and when he hit the water, a whale gulped him down.
Jonah used prayers to escape his captivity, but for Michael Packard, his story of ending up inside a whale went a little differently. The experienced lobster diver was in the waterway off Herring Cove Beach in Massachusetts on his boat, “Ja’n J,” on June 11, 2021.
His job is to dive down to the sandy bottom and grab lobsters, which he was doing when a humpback whale swallowed him.
What. The. Heck. https://t.co/FNYuzUneSY
— Katie Kull (@KatieKull1) June 11, 2021
Everything went black. Packard felt the whale’s mouth muscles constricting around him and thought he was about to meet his demise. He thought it was a shark that consumed him at first, but realized he had no physical wounds and that the creature must have been a whale.
As thoughts of his sons, aged 12 and 15, played through his head, the diver was unsure what to do. He tried struggling, but the whale was not happy about his movements, so he ended up waiting it out until the whale surfaced and light poured into the pitch darkness as the whale spit him out.
A crewman, Josiah Mayo, picked Packard out of the water after his release and got him back to shore, at which point he went to the Cape Cod Hospital. He suffered only soft tissue damage.
The general public should not let this story scare them because it was likely an accident. Whales don’t eat humans for food, and incidents like this are therefore almost unheard of.
Copyright 2021, TheIndependentStar.com
