Posted on July 28, 2024
RYE, N.H. — Two people were thrown into the ocean after a humpback whale landed on their fishing boat off the New Hampshire coast on Tuesday morning, and the entire incident was caught on video.
“We didn’t see him for a couple of minutes, and then the next thing we knew, he popped up and landed right on the transom of the boat,” said Gregg Paquette of Groveland, who was aboard the fishing boat with Ryland Kenney of Dover, New Hampshire.
“I just looked up and just kind of saw the boat tipping, and I said, ‘The only way to avoid this is to just kind of jump horizontally away,'” said Kenney.
Wyatt Yager, 19, of Maine, said he and his brother Colin, 16, were fishing about one mile off the New Hampshire coast because they were looking for pogies. Colin spotted the whale and began recording, with his video showing Wyatt in the foreground.
“I saw it go up so I was just lucky enough to be facing the right direction,” Colin said.
“I saw it come up, and I was just like, ‘Oh, it’s going to hit the boat,’ and then it kind of started to flip,” said Yager.
“When I turned, the whale’s head was already landing on the engine,” said Paquette. “So when I saw that, then all of a sudden, I look down, the boat is pitching up, the transom is going down into the water.”
“Everything seemed like in slow motion. It was really weird,” Kenney said. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh, it was eight seconds. How’d you move so fast?’ But it was almost slow motion, like a movie.”
Yager’s video shows the whale breaching, propelling fish out of the water. As the massive animal’s mouth closes, it flops over onto the rear of the nearby fishing boat with two men aboard.
Video: Boaters warned to keep distance from humpback whales
One of the men jumped and the other was thrown overboard as their boat rolled, and the Yager brothers said they helped pull them out of the water. Luckily, no one was seriously injured.
“Truly grateful to them,” said Paquette. “They were making the video, dropped everything, zoomed right over and plucked us out.”
“It’s kind of a miracle that I’m alive,” said Kenney. “I don’t know what was going through my head. Just, kind of, survival.”
A statement from the U.S. Coast Guard confirmed that the agency received a mayday call after the whale caused the 23-foot center console boat to capsize. The Coast Guard also confirmed that the men who were on the boat were recovered by other boaters and brought to Great Bay Marina.
Video below: See Yager’s video of the whale
Sara Morris of the University of New Hampshire Shoals Marine Laboratory said the whale was likely lunge feeding when it came in contact with the boat.
“I think one of the key things is that when whales are sighted to encourage boaters to keep their distance,” Morris said. “The whales are moving around underwater and coming up, potentially in an area different from where they went down, and we want to give them as much leeway as we possibly can to avoid a situation like what you see here.”
