In the 15 years that Rainer Schimpf has been working as a dive tour operator, he’s seen a lot of whales. Usually, he sees them from the outside. In February, however, Schimpf found himself in an unlikely place: inside a Bryde’s whale’s mouth.
The 51-year-old Rainer headed out that morning to photograph a sardine run off the coast of South Africa, which generally attracts a whole lot of sea life. Penguins, seals, dolphins, sharks, and whales all show up to feed, rounding the fish up into bait balls.
That morning, Schimpf’s team headed some 25 nautical miles from shore, found a bait ball, and hopped in the water. That was when he almost became a real-life Jonah. “I was trying to get a shot of a shark going through the bait ball,” he told Barcroft.tv. “And then the next moment it got dark and I felt some pressure when I instantly knew, a whale had grabbed me.”
According to Schimpf, he didn’t have enough time to feel afraid. “I could feel the pressure on my hip,” he said. “There is no time for fear in a situation like that – you have to use your instincts.”
Instead, he took a deep breath, assuming the whale was about to dive with him in its mouth. “I held my breath because I thought, ‘he is going to dive down and release me much deeper in the ocean,'” he explained. “It was pitch black inside.”
Schimpf’s colleagues looked on in shock as their friend disappeared with the whale. “As Rainer moved towards the bait ball, suddenly the water churned up, and I knew for sure that something was about to happen so I held the focus of my camera on him firmly,” Heinz Toperczer, who was filming from the boat, said. “Suddenly, dolphins shot out of the water, a white spray came out and then a whale appeared and grabbed him!”
Of course, whales are not exactly known to be hungry for humans, and Bryde’s whales are no exception. “Whales are no man-eaters – so this was really an accident,” Schimpf said. “They are gentle giants.”
Luckily, the whale realized its mistake shortly after it happened and unceremoniously spat Schimpf out just a few feet below the surface, completely unharmed.
“It gives me a connection to the whale which I don’t think anyone else has had,” he said. “I don’t think I had a ‘whale’ of a time, but I have the inside knowledge of what a whale is like. It was an interesting experience, but certainly nothing I want to do again.”
