A 55-year-old man practicing windsurfing at an Australian beach in Sydney was captured on camera at the moment he collided with a humpback whale that emerged from the water, landing on him and pulling him underwater. The footage shows Jason Breen saying, "Damn, a whale just hit me." He later remarked, "I thought I was done, to be honest. I thought for a few seconds: this is what dying feels like."
As he struggled with the whale beneath him, he felt the whale's soft skin before the rope attached to his leg broke, allowing him to make his way back to the surface and to his board. Once he reached the shore, he saw some colleagues and told them what had happened.
Breen said, "They thought I was making up a story, then I realized that my GoPro camera had captured everything." It also happened that a passerby was filming Breen as he swung across the beach with the whale above him. Breen pointed out that he "was lucky it was a small whale. If it had been an adult, he doesn’t think he would have survived to tell the tale."
Last month, a 61-year-old man died after a whale collided with his boat in Botany Bay.
