MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Now to a whale of a tale, a literal whale. It resembles the biblical Jonah or young Pinocchio, except no lies here. This really happened.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Father and son Dall and Adrian Simancas were kayaking off the coast of southern Chile last Saturday when the jaws of a humpback whale surround Adrian's kayak and close around him. He disappears into the ocean. And his dad, Dall, got this all on video. A few seconds later, the camera pans to his son, now in the water gripping his bright yellow kayak.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DALL SIMANCAS: (Non-English language spoken).
KELLY: That is the voice of Dall telling his son, swim over. Adrian described the experience to the AP.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ADRIAN SIMANCAS: (Through interpreter) At first, when I thought I had died, it was, of course, a lot of terror because I thought there was nothing I could do.
IAIN KERR: We noticed he was quite gracefully ejected from the mass. I'm sure the whale was like, I'm not eating this, you know?
KELLY: Iain Kerr, CEO of the whale conservation nonprofit Ocean Alliance, says a humpback whale just doesn't have the anatomy to swallow a human. Its throat is only about the size of a human fist. So unlike his fictional wooden counterpart, Adrian Simancas was never in the belly of whale.
CHANG: Which was a relief - but I'm guessing he would have wanted to skip being inside the whale's mouth, too.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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