How’s That Jonah Story Looking Now?

By now you’ve probably seen the video of a humpback whale gobbling up Adrián Simancas, a Chilean kayaker and his kayak, only to spit them right back out.

Some people are saying the video is a fake while others are saying he was lucky it wasn’t a man-eating whale. However, it’s not the first time a whale tale such as this has been reported. Here’s one from a few years ago that happened off the coast of Cape Code when Michael Packard had a close encounter with a humpback whale.

Rainer Schimpf, another fellow in the video, says he went through a similar terrifying experience off the coast of Africa.

As for myself, I couldn’t help thinking of Jonah in the belly of the whale for 3 days. Over the years, I’ve occasionally run across things that I felt weren’t translated or transcribed correctly, usually having to do with poetry. One is a Robert Browning poem where he misunderstood the reward French sailor Herve Riel asked for. So I wondered if Jonah’s story got lost in translation. Maybe It wasn’t 3 days. Maybe it was only 3 seconds.