Snorkeller swept into mouth of baleen whale

Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.

And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

According to South Africa’s New Straits Times, a 51-year-old conservationist has become a second Jonah; he was swept into a whale’s mouth.

His sojourn there, however, lasted seconds, not three days.

Rainer Schimpf was snorkelling above a dense shoal during the famous sardine-run off Port Elizabeth.

Suddenly, a Bryde’s whale surged vertically upwards through the fishy throng, gulping everything in its path, including Schimpf.

The whale, he told reporters, “realised its mistake and opened its mouth, releasing me. I was washed out with what felt like tonnes of water from its mouth.”

No harm was done; even his camera remained intact.

“If I was reborn, I would like to come back as a whale,” he added.

A man has been swept into the jaws of a large whale in South Africa. Dive tour operator, Rainer Schimpf, was trying to document a sardine run when he was swallowed up by a Bryde's Whale. #SouthAfrica #7News pic.twitter.com/L7MEuWTPQT

— 7NEWS Sydney (@7NewsSydney) March 10, 2019

Bryde’s, pronounced ‘brood’s’, whale is called after Johan Bryde, a Norwegian who built the first whaling stations in South Africa.

This warm-water species, up to 15m long, doesn’t venture as far north as Irish waters.

Luckily for Schimpf, it’s a ‘baleen’, not a ‘toothed’, cetacean which fills its huge mouth with water, trapping fish and krill in its sieve, the baleen.

Such filter feeders never harm people. Toothed whales, however, become aggressive if threatened or ill-treated.

Moby Dick, which had bitten off Captain Ahab’s leg in Hermann Melville’s classic tale, was a sperm whale, a member of the largest toothed species.

In 1850, twenty-one years before the novel appeared, an American whaling ship, the Essex, was rammed by a sperm whale and 12 crew-men died.

Fungie, also of the toothed fraternity, has behaved impeccably around people but there have been complaints about Dusty, another precocious bottle-nosed dolphin.

She has been involved in several ‘incidents’ with swimmers off the Clare coast.

Orcas, the largest dolphins, target seals and sharks. They don’t harm people in the wild but it’s a different story in captivity.

The notorious Tilikum, which became the largest domesticated one, was netted as a two-year old off Iceland in 1983 and held at a marine park near Victoria, Canada.

He and two female whales were together in February 1991 when a trainer, Keltie Byrne, entered their pool.

It was the first time anyone had been in the water with them. The two females seized Keltie, tossing her back and forth. Tilikum joined in, drowning the unfortunate girl.

Tilikum was transferred to Seaworld Orlando.

Keepers there never swam with him but, one morning in July 1999, the naked body of 27-year-old man was found draped over the whale’s back.

The victim had hidden in the park at closing time and entered the water during the night. He had sustained multiple injuries and drowned.

Eleven years later, when his trainer, Dawn Brancheau, was rubbing him, Tilikum grabbed her ponytail, dragged her into the pool and held her under water until she drowned.

Sharks, rather then whales, probably inspired the Jonah story.

They target swimmers or surfers occasionally, mistaking them for seals.

Finding a much bonier creature, with an unusual taste, in its mouth, a shark promptly releases the victim, which is why shark bites are far commoner than fatalities.

With retelling such stories, the few seconds between capture and release in shark attack incidents might be exaggerated to the three days of the biblical account?

Schimpf and Jonah were in the wrong place at the wrong time.