A humpback whale landed on a fishing boat off the New Hampshire coast, throwing two people into the ocean. The entire incident was caught on video.
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A video captured from a nearby boat revealed at least two people onboard. Colin, 16, and Wyatt Yager, 19, from Maine, were fishing on another boat in the harbor when the whale breached. After recording the astonishing moment, they quickly rushed to assist the distressed boaters.
Gregg Paquette from Groveland was on the fishing boat with Ryland Kenney from Dover, New Hampshire. Remarkably, neither man sustained any injuries.
“We didn’t see him for a couple of minutes, and then the next thing we knew, he popped up and landed right on the transom of the boat,” Paquette told Boston’s WCVB.
“[We] just looked up and just kind of saw the boat tipping, and I said, ‘The only way to avoid this is to just kind of jump horizontally away,'” Kenney recalled.
“I saw it go up so I was just lucky enough to be facing the right direction,” Colin Yager, who recorded the footage of the incident, recounted.
“I saw it come up, and I was just like, ‘Oh, it’s going to hit the boat,’ and then it kind of started to flip,” he added.
“When I turned, the whale’s head was already landing on the engine,” Paquette explained. “So when I saw that, then all of a sudden, I look down, the boat is pitching up, the transom is going down into the water.”
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“Everything seemed like in slow motion. It was really weird,” Kenney recalled. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh, it was eight seconds. How’d you move so fast?’ But it was almost slow motion, like a movie.”
Yager’s video captures the moment a whale breaches, sending fish flying out of the water. As the colossal creature’s mouth snaps shut, it tumbles onto the stern of a nearby fishing boat, where two men are aboard.
As their boat capsized, one man jumped while the other was thrown overboard. The Yager brothers quickly assisted in pulling them from the water. Fortunately, no one sustained serious injuries.
“Truly grateful to them,” Paquette said of the Yager brothers. “They were making the video, dropped everything, zoomed right over, and plucked us out.”
“It’s kind of a miracle that I’m alive,” Kenney added. “I don’t know what was going through my head. Just, kind of, survival.”
The U.S. Coast Guard confirmed that neither of the boaters was hurt, and the whale also seemed unharmed. Whales are frequently spotted in New Hampshire waters, particularly from June to August. A whale, possibly the same one that breached over the boat, had been seen in the same area earlier.