I’ve never been up close to a humpback whale, at least not that I’ve been aware of. I have also never been up close to a whale while paddling in a kayak. That’s just not enough protection for me. I need some semblance of protection that’s provided by a boat, even if that boat would crack in half if a giant whale landed on it.
Tom Mustill is cut from a different cloth. This 35-year-old Brit went viral a few years ago after another kayaker captured footage of a breaching humpback whale jumping right on top of Tom’s kayak in Monterey Bay just down the coast from San Francisco.
Tom’s now reliving that incident that could’ve cost him his life if the whale landed just a few inches in the other direction. As it happened, the fully-grown male humpback whale landed on the end of the kayak and sent Tom and his friend Charlotte into the water.
This fully-grown whale weighs the equivalent of 14 ADULT ELEPHANTS and if landed just a few inches away it could’ve come down right on top of Tom and Charlotte and they would’ve been crushed on the spot. Here’s footage of that original incident with details about the harrowing ordeal below shared by Tom as part of a new documentary titled Humpback Whales: A Detective Story.
Here are some excerpts from the NYPost’s article about Tom:
“This whale jumped out of the water from nowhere. It just felt enormous, impossibly big — it blocked out the sunlight as it came over us, water was dripping off its body and the grooves of its mouth,” he recalls.
“And whales have really distinctive, fishy breath that you can smell in the air when you get close to them. It’s not a nice smell and obviously really startling.”
But Mustill says he didn’t “have time to be scared.”“I think I instinctively starting cowering away from it — after that, everything is blank in my mind until I was underwater,” he said.
Mustill and his friend Charlotte, who was at the front of the kayak, were dragged underwater by the force of the whale as it dived into the depths and Mustill was sure he was dead as his body was thrown around like a doll.“The next thing I knew there was this tremendous force pulling my body,” he recalls.
“It was so strong I’d never felt force like that. I thought I was dead or at least fatally injured, that my arms and legs were broken.“But after swimming to the surface and realizing I had miraculously survived, I was sure that Charlotte was dead. It was a fact to me for those few seconds — it was impossible I had survived, let alone both of us.” (via)
I can’t even imagine the sheer terror of making it to the surface, gasping for air, and thinking your close friend and travel companion was dead because a several ton humpback whale just crushed them. And I cannot fathom the relief when you see that person also pop up to the surface. But I suppose that’s also when the panic sets in that you’re in shark-infested waters and you’ve just lost your boat.
The details of this story are absolutely insane and I highly recommend heading on over to the NYPost to check out the full article. Humpback Whales: A Detective Story will air on BBC2 so it’s unclear when it’ll be available here in America.