He catches lobster and finds himself in the mouth of a whale: bad adventure for a spear lobster fisherman in Massachusetts. The man was swallowed by a blue whale on Cape Cod but was saved thanks to a ‘cough’ from the cetacean. “I thought I was going to die,” says Michael Packard who, stirring inside the mammal, annoyed him to the point that the whale ‘coughed’ and he managed to save himself. “Suddenly I felt a push and a second later it was all black: I was entirely inside the whale.” “I thought, ‘It’s over, I’m dead,'” he tells the Cape Cod Times from his hospital bed. The man was hospitalized for superficial injuries after all and his condition does not cause concern.
“I thought I would have no escape, at that moment my mind went to my two children aged 12 and 15,” he says again. Packard began to fidget inside the whale’s mouth. The animal, annoyed, began to shake its muzzle from right to left before re-emerging. And at that point, after a nightmare 30-40 seconds, the sub ‘spat’. “I saw the light, the whale was moving from side to side. And suddenly I found myself outside,” he adds. Not negligible detail: Packard was the protagonist of another dramatic adventure ten years ago. The man was on board a small tourist plane that crashed in Costa Rica. The two pilots and a passenger died in the crash. The survivors, including Packard, survived two days in the jungle before being recovered.