Adrián Simancas did not see anything coming.
He was paddling alongside his father Dell in Bahía El Águila, near the San Isidro lighthouse, in the Strait of Magellan, when the water opened up and a humpback whale engulfed him whole, yellow kayak included. Seconds that felt like the end to him: “I thought I was dead… that it had swallowed me”, he would later recount. But outside, just a few meters away, his father kept filming and talking to him, repeating over and over “stay calm, stay calm”, as if that phrase could hold him up from afar.
The whale let him go almost as quickly as it had caught him. Adrián swam to his father’s kayak, more afraid of the icy waters of Chilean Patagonia than of the animal that had just freed him. Both returned to shore unharmed, and that video ended up going around the world.
Sometimes the greatest scare of your life is survived thanks to a familiar voice that never stops calling out to you.
