
The New York Post:
His name’s not Jonah — but this Cape Cod man sure has something in common with the biblical figure now.
Commercial lobster diver Michael Packard was going about his business off the coast off Provincetown, Mass. when he was swallowed whole by a humpback whale — trapped in its gullet for nearly a minute before being coughed back up, according to a report.
Packard, 56, was about 35 feet below the surface near Herring Cove Beach at 8 a.m. Friday when the massive mammal tried to turn him into breakfast, the Cape Cod Times reported.
“All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black,” Packard told the outlet. “I could sense I was moving, and I could feel the whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth.”
Stunned, his first thought was that he’d been snapped up by a great white shark — and was done for.
Packard told the local CBS News affiliate that he thought to himself “This is it, I’m gonna die.”
“I was completely inside [the whale]; it was completely black,” Packard told the Cape Cod Times. “I thought to myself, ‘there’s no way I’m getting out of here. I’m done, I’m dead. All I could think of was my boys, they’re 12 and 15 years old.”