A windsurfer recorded himself being wiped out by an enormous juvenile humpback whale on a GoPro 360 camera.
Jason Breen, 55, was out wind foiling (a type of kite surfing) in Moana Vale, Sydney when the whale leaped from the depths below and took him out.
“I went out yesterday morning, 10:30, beautiful day, sun’s out,” Breen tells the Today Show Australia.
“I went out wind foiling, turned around to come back in and I saw it on my righthand side.
“It just started to come up out of the water and I knew it was a whale and as it got higher and higher it just got bigger and bigger and I thought ‘You know what I’m in trouble here’ and it just landed on top of me.”
Breen says the whale took him down about “20 to 30 feet” before he was luckily able to escape because his leash broke.
“Basically when it came down on top of me it got caught in my leash (my leg rope) and as it dived down I was just getting dragged down so I’m really lucky,” he says.
The surfer explains that the leash is not supposed to break but the webbing was ripped out which potentially saved his life.
“I could feel the whale’s body on top of me against my skin and it was pushing me down and just that mass on top of me and I felt the leash break and then from there I sort of got released from under the whale’s body and was able to come to the surface,” he adds.
Breen’s GoPro 360 camera was not the only device that captured the incident; a person filming from the shore also captured the incident which is shown in Today’s news segment below.
The surfer calls it a “one in a million” and adds that his GoPro was just “sticking out” of his pocket and he wasn’t actually planning to film any footage.
“To get the footage was amazing,” he adds. “Because I think without the footage… I told my mates when I came in ‘I’ve been hit by a whale’ and they thought I was talking it up.”
But of course, the footage proves it beyond doubt.