‘This is what it feels like to die’: Surfer body-slammed by humpback whale in dramatic clip
It was a whale of a fail.
An Australian surfer is lucky to be alive after getting body-slammed by a humpback whale, which then dragged him underwater by his leash. Footage of the Moby-Dick move is currently making waves online.
“It came down, landed straight on me,” Jason Breen, 55, told 9News of the incident, which occurred at around 10:30 a.m. Wednesday while he was windsurfing off Sydney’s northern beaches.
The Aussie had been shredding the waves when he was struck by a juvenile humpback whale.
The heart-pounding footage, captured via Breen’s Go-Pro, shows the waterman cruising along the water.
All of a sudden, the cetacean breaches and accidentally clotheslines the surfer with its body like an oceanic defensive tackle, sending him flying into the drink.
And that was just the tip of the iceberg. During the collision, the whale hooked Breen’s leash and dragged him underwater like a modern-day Nantucket Sleigh Ride.
“It probably dragged me 20 or 30 feet under, to be honest,” recalled the windsurfer, who thought “it was all over” until he felt his leash break and surfaced shortly thereafter.
Meanwhile, a birds-eye view of the interspecies collision was captured by a passerby named Paul Netteback, who happened to be filming Breen at the time.
“I wanted to keep filming but then I thought someone might have just died, so I stopped filming and I got triple zero ready [the Australian emergency number],” the eyewitness recounted.
Thankfully, Breen emerged from the incident largely unscathed, which was lucky considering that humpback whales are among the largest creatures on earth, growing up to 60 feet long and weighing up to 40 tons.
The Aussie credits his survival to the whale’s smaller size.
“If it had barnacles I would have been ripped apart because the whale’s body was beside me the whole time,” the grateful bodyslam survivor said.
This isn’t the first time someone has been whaled on at sea.
Last summer, a humpback whale body-slammed a 19-foot boat off the coast of Plymouth, Massachusetts, seriously damaging the vessel, but thankfully not injuring any of the passengers.
