Michael Packard entered the water at 8 a.m. Friday for his second dive of the day.
His boat was surrounded by a fleet of boats that were fishing for striped bass. The water was 60 degrees and visibility was 20 feet.
Packard dove down Friday morning and saw a group of sand lances and stripers swimming by.
Michael Packard escaped from the whale's mouth.
Packard was close to the bottom of the ocean and knew what it felt like to be part of the chain.
Packard was eaten by a whale.
Packard was released from the Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis on Friday afternoon.
He said he felt the whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth.
Has a man been swallowed by a whale?
Packard thought he was inside a great white shark, but he couldn't feel any teeth and didn't suffer any obvious wounds. He realized that he had been eaten by a whale.
Packard said that it was black. I thought to myself that I wouldn't be able to get out of here. I'm done. The only thing I could think of was my boys.
The whale shook its head so that Packard could tell he didn't like it. He thought he was in the whale for 30 to 40 seconds.
Packard, who lives in Wellfleet, said that he saw light and saw a man throw his head side to side.
Rescuers free a whale from fishing gear.
Guirec Soudée is set to cross the Atlantic.
Cynthia Packard spoke with the crewman who gave her some of the information. Packard said that he thought the whale was a great white shark after seeing it burst to the surface.
The action was at the top of the water. The whale threw her brother into the water. He was picked up by Mayo and taken to the pier. The fire department took him to the hospital.
It wasn't a white shark. Cynthia Packard said that he saw them all the time. He must have thought he had accomplished something.
Jooke Robbins is the director of Humpback Whale Studies at the Center for Coastal Studies. umpbacks are not aggressive towards humans.
The lobster diver apologized to the whale.
Michael Packard said the whale was medium-sized and Robbins thought it was a juvenile feeding on sand lance. Robbins said that when a humpback opens its mouth to feed, it billows out like a parachute, blocking the animal's forward vision.
Robbins said that incidents of injuries to swimmers and divers, especially instances of swallowing them, are so rare that they are hard to find. Nontoothed whales have small mouths that they can wrap around large objects and spit out. Baleen whales that filter out small schooling fish don't explore or cause injuries with their mouths. Their tails are generally used.
Robbins said that it was not something he had heard before. It would have taken a lot of things to get in the way of the whale.
Charles "Stormy" Mayo is a senior scientist and whale expert at the Center for Coastal Studies. There are areas of the world where you can get a permit to get close to whales.
The people dive on them in the tropics. There are no incidents of people having problems with them in those places.
A Packard crewman is the son of a woman.
A whale is a reminder of climate change.
Stormy said that MichaelPackard is an exceptional diver. You can be certain that he did everything he was supposed to do.
He had a lot of soft tissue damage but no broken bones when he was released from the hospital. He promised to return to diving as soon as possible.
Commercial lobster divers are not easy to get along with. They brave the cold waters off Provincetown to grab migrating lobsters off a sandy shelf when they emerge from an adjacent deep channel.
It is a dangerous place. The crewman topside follows the diver below as he is pushed by the strong currents. Packard was dragged out to sea and treaded water for hours before being rescued, and he recovered the body of a fellow diver who had died.
Packard has had close calls in the past.
There are sharks and seals off Cape Cod.
He was lucky to be alive after his first sail.
He was a passenger in a plane that crashed in Costa Rica ten years ago, killing the pilot, co-pilot and a passenger. Packard had abdominal and upper body injuries. After two nights in the jungle, the five passengers wouldn't have survived another night.
lobstermen get free gear to protect whales.
Packard believes he may be the last lobster diver in the area.
Dave "Spider" Gibson, a charter boat fisherman, stood on the pier Friday afternoon. I have never seen a better lobster diver. He is aware of what he is doing.
Mary Ann Bragg made a contribution.
The article was first published on Cape Cod Times.
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