I’m not sure why, but this story has a familiar ring to it. Off the coast of Chile, Adrián Simancas was kayaking in the cold Pacific waters when he was approached by one of the sea’s great creatures – a humpback whale.  What happened next, well, it’s a whale of a story.

A humpback whale swallowed a man on a kayak off the coast of Chile last week, before he was quickly able to get out of the leviathan’s mouth unharmed.

Video shows the death-defying and terrifying moment from last Saturday, when Adrián Simancas was kayaking with his father, Dell, in Bahía El Águila near the San Isidro Lighthouse in the Strait of Magellan, off Chilean Patagonia.

As Simancas was paddling in what appeared to be an inflatable kayak, a humpback whale rolled on the surface with its mouth open, swallowing the kayaker.

Moments later, the tail broke the surface and the whale dove to deeper depth. Simancas and his yellow kayak then resurfaced after being freed from the clutches of the whale’s jaws.

I’ve observed whales doing this in Cook Inlet and Resurrection Bay. In lunge feeding, a humpback opens its mouth wide, then speeds – lunges – through a concentration of small fish or krill. Sometimes they approach from beneath, and they can propel their entire heads out of the water. If you’re ever in the position to watch whales feeding, you’re liable to see this behavior for yourself; a watched pot never boils, after all, but sometimes a watched whale breaches.

From this video, it looks like the humpback was lunge feeding, took the man and kayak in its cavernous mouth for just a moment, then spit him out. It’s still a fin-tastic thing that the kayaker was able to get out unharmed, but he was never in any danger of being swallowed.