“I could sense that I was moving, and I could feel the whole whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth.”
Those are the words of Michael Packard, who is a commercial lobster diver who works off the coast of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Apparently, early Friday morning, he was diving at about 35 feet below the surface near the Herring Cove Beach when he encountered an angry humpback whale. This giant marine mammal decided that he wanted to make a meal out of the unsuspecting diver, and swallowed him whole. “All of a sudden, I felt a huge shove against me and the next thing I knew it was completely black,” Packard said to the New York Post. That is when he uttered the iconic words noted above and said that the whale was squeezing him with the muscles in his mouth.
This lobster diver spent almost nearly a minute in the animal’s gullet before being coughed up again. The lobster diver’s first thought was that he had been gobbled up by a great white shark. He spoke to a local CBS News affiliate, and he said that he thought for sure that his life was over, and he was thinking, “This is it, I’m gonna die.”
However, there was one point where the diver-turned-delicacy realized that there was one thing missing from this meal equation for the fish that had eaten him whole: teeth! He hadn’t felt any teeth! That is when the lobster diver realized there was a glimmer of hope and he began struggling. The lobster diver’s movement must have caused the creature some discomfort, because it soon began shaking its head. Shortly thereafter, the massive mammal coughed him out and sent him back into the ocean.
“You have to understand, I was completely inside this whale, and it was completely black,” Packard said in an interview to the Cape Cod Times. “I thought to myself, ‘there’s no way that I’m going to get out of here. I’m done, I’m dead. All I could think of was my boys, one is 15 and one who is 12 years old.'”
There is no question that Mr. Packard was luckier than his counterpart, that of the biblical character Jonah. The Bible tells us that Jonah spent 3 days and 3 nights inside the belly of that whale before he was coughed out. “Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.”
Apparently, God has other plans for Mr. Packard just like he did with Jonah.
What do you think about this remarkable story?