Lobster divers literally pluck lobsters off the sandy bottom, and as he dove down, he saw schools of sand lances and stripers swimming by. The ocean food chain was in full evidence, but about 35 feet down, 10 feet from the bottom, he entered that food chain in a startling and rare way.
“All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black,” Michael Packard recalled Friday afternoon following his release from Cape Cod Hospital. “I could sense I was moving, and I could feel the whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth.”
“I was completely inside (the whale); it was completely black,” Packard said. “I thought to myself, ‘there’s no way I’m getting out of here. I’m done, I’m dead. All I could think of was my boys, they’re 12 and 15 years old.”
Packard says he was inside the whale for 30-40 seconds before the whale surfaced and spit him out.
Packard suffered a lot of soft tissue damage.
