A viral video shows a father-son excursion gone wrong as a humpback whale briefly swallowed the son while kayaking off the coast of Chile.
On Saturday, February 8, 2025, Adrián Simancas and his father, Dell, were vacationing in Bahía El Águila, near the San Isidro Lighthouse in the Strait of Magellan. The area is 1,600 miles (3,000 kilometers) south of Santiago, Chile. With summer in full swing in the Southern Hemisphere, the Straight of Magellan is a popular tourist attraction for its aquatic adventure activities.
Adrián and Dell were kayaking when disaster struck. Dell was paddling a mere few yards away, filming their excursion when suddenly a humpback whale surfaced. The harrowing video shows Adrián and his yellow kayak engulfed by the whale, disappearing entirely from view as the whale takes him underwater. A few moments go by, and suddenly, the whale lets him go. Dell is heard in the background encouraging his son to remain calm and grab the boat. The father-son duo were able to get to shore uninjured.
“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,” Adrián Simancas explained to CNN en Español. He described feeling his life vest “pull me up, and then two seconds later I was back on the surface and then started understanding what happened.”
Speaking with The Associated Press, Adrián shared how terrifying the moment was. “When I came up and started floating, 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.”
Despite the summer weather, the waters in the Straight of Magellan are frigid. Fortunately for the duo, they were wearing their life vests and reacted quickly.
The whale, for its part, was merely lunge feeding. Despite their large size of 46-49 feet (14–15 meters) long, humpback whales’ primary food sources are small: krill, copepods, and plankton. Tiny marine crustaceans like krill average 0.4–0.8 inches (1–2 centimeters) long. With such minuscule prey in mind, this brief human encounter was surely an accident.
While whale attacks on people are exceedingly rare, it is not unusual for people to get a frighteningly close look at whales. In 2021, photographer Douglas Croft captured a stunning photo of a humpback whale breaching near a small fishing vessel. In 2023, a killer whale, which is technically a dolphin, was observed attacking boats off the coast of Spain and Portugal.
Video Credit: Dell Simancas, The Associated Press
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