You maybe know about Pinocchio or Jonah, both stories where a man (or puppet) is swallowed by a whale. Or maybe you’ve seen Aquaman, where, inspired by Pinocchio, the two lead characters hide in a humpback whale’s mouth. Well, the same thing almost happened to a pair of kayakers. What’s more, one of the kayakers filmed the whole thing. Now, we can hear from them.

The Kayakers And The Whale

Julie McSorley and Liz Cottriel are a pair of friends from San Luis Obispo. The two kayakers went out on Avila Beach, California, on Monday, November 2nd, 2020. 

There had been sightings of humpback whales in the area, which had drawn out many kayakers and other paddleboarders to watch them feed. So, when Cottriel came to visit McSorley, McSorley was excited for the two of them to go. Cottriel wasn’t so keen. “Her reaction was, ‘No, I don’t like the ocean. I’m scared of sharks. I’m scared of anything I can’t see in the water,’” says McSorley. “And I so ignorantly told her, ‘Oh, they’re never going to dump you over. The kayaks are very stable. I’ve never had an issue.’ And so she reluctantly came with me just to have a new experience.” (1, 2)

The Whale Watching

The kayakers had been in the water for about an hour, following a steady rhythm. Firstly, the two of them would watch a swarm of fish appear in the water. These fish clusters are known as bait balls. Then, they would watch and wait for the humpback whale to surface and feed. After, the two kayakers would move their kayaks into the area where the whales had just fed. However, after that hour, they realized they had made a mistake. The bait ball had formed right around their kayak. “So I knew it was going to be very close,” says McSorley. “But again, I’d seen whales breach right next to kayaks before. So my mind was like, this is going to be, you know, super cool. And then all of a sudden the boat lifted up and we were dumped in the water very, very quickly.” (2)

The Whale Encounter

“I saw the whale come up,” says McSorley. “I thought, ‘Oh no! It’s too close.”

She was filming on her cell phone the entire time.

“I’m thinking to myself, ‘I’m going to push. Like, I’m going to push a whale out of the way. It was the weirdest thought,” says Cottriel. She had thrown up her arm as the whale’s mouth came down on them. She had believed it was the belly of the whale. “I’m thinking, ‘I’m dead. I’m dead,’” says Cottriel. “I thought it was going to land on me. Next thing I know, I’m under water.”

Soon, other kayakers came to see if the two women were okay. “They were telling us, ‘You were in the mouth, you were in the whale’s mouth!” McSorley says. “But we didn’t have any idea at that time. And it didn’t really hit us until we watched the video later.” (1, 2)