Move over sharks, a humpback whale is stealing the show today.
Australian foil surfer Jason Breen was body slammed by a baby humpback whale while foil surfing off Sydney’s Northern Beaches this morning.
Breen, 55, said the whale got caught in his leash and dragged him 20 or 30 feet underwater
9News Australia posted the clip above hours ago and captioned it:
“Just got hit by a whale! A wing-surfer has filmed an unbelievable encounter off Sydney’s Northern Beaches.”
Breen recalled the incident to 9News:
“It came down, landed straight on me, and got caught in my leash. It probably dragged me 20 or 30 feet under, to be honest. I thought it was all over, then I felt my leash break and I thought, ‘Thank god’ and came up to the top.”
In the footage, the whale launches up and out of the water right into Breen, hitting him like a bullseye.
Luckily, Breen was not seriously injured.
He thinks the whale’s smaller size was what saved his life, 9News said.
“It was a big calf, if it had barnacles I would have been ripped apart because the whale’s body was beside me the whole time,” he said.
Breen’s own GoPro captured the action, but so did Paul Netteback who was passing by “filming Breen surf by pure coincidence when he witnessed the whale topple him,” according to 9News.
“I wanted to keep filming but then I thought someone might have just died, so I stopped filming and I got triple zero ready,” he said.
The full report with Netteback’s footage of the body slam is available here.
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