[imagesource: Packard family / NY Post]

56-year-old Michael Packard is a very fortunate man.

The resident of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, was diving at a depth of around 14 metres, as he often does during his work as a lobster diver, when “everything went dark”.

After initially thinking he had been attacked by a shark, he realised he was caught in the mouth of a humpback whale.

That’s still a rather terrifying conclusion to draw, with The Cape Cod Times reporting that he immediately thought about his family:

“I was completely inside; it was completely black,” Packard said. “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.”

Outfitted with scuba gear, he struggled and the whale began shaking its head so that Packard could tell he didn’t like it. He estimated he was in the whale for 30 to 40 seconds before the whale finally surfaced.

At this point, we’ll allow Packard to tell his own story:

Marine experts say that whilst incidents like this are exceedingly rare, Packard must have ended up in the whale’s feeding path, and been accidentally scooped up.

Last year, kayakers off the coast of California had a very narrow escape.

Jooke Robbins, director of Humpback Whale Studies at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, suspects it was a juvenile humpback feeding on a small type of fish called sand lance:

When a humpback opens its mouth to feed, it billows out like a parachute, blocking the animal’s forward vision, which is why so many become entangled in fishing gear in their mouth and jaws, said Robbins.

The crewman who helped pull Packard back aboard the boat, Josiah Mayo, saw the whale burst to the surface, before ‘flinging’ Packard out of his mouth and back into the water.

After a few days of intense media attention, Packard’s son, Jacob, ran a Reddit AMA (ask me anything), relaying questions to his dad, because “he isn’t the most internet-savvy person”.

Some of the questions and answers below:

A simple dude with one hell of a story to tell.

You can see all of the responses on the thread here.

Packard was released from Cape Cod Hospital on Friday afternoon, saying he had suffered “a lot of soft tissue damage” but no broken bones, adding that he would return to diving as soon as he had healed.

[sources:capecodtimes&reddit]