By Nicole Acevedo and David K. Li - NBC News
A lobster fisherman was saved from dying after a humpback whale nearly swallowed him Friday morning off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Michael Packard survived a harrowing half-minute inside the whale's mouth before the powerful marine mammal "spit him out," the man wrote on Facebook.
"A humpback whale tried to eat me," said Packard, 56.
"I was in his closed mouth for about 30 to 40 seconds before he came to the surface and spit at me.
I am very bruised, but I have no broken bones."
In his post, he also thanked lifeguards for pulling him out of the water.
Packard, who is the father of two boys, ages 12 and 16, returned home to his family Friday afternoon after being released from Cape Cod Hospital with a dislocated knee and soft tissue damage, he said.
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The fisherman told the NBC affiliate in Boston that he was submerged looking for lobsters at a depth of 45 feet (14 meters) when he felt "like a truck" had hit him and "everything went dark."
Initially he
thought that he had been attacked by a shark
, which is common in the waters of the area, but later he realized that he did not feel the animal's teeth or pain.
"And then I said, 'Oh my God, I'm in the closed mouth of a whale,'"
Packard told NBC Boston, adding that he tried to find his breathing apparatus while he was inside the animal's mouth.
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"Am I going to run out of air and suffocate? Is it going to swallow me? This is how you are going to die, Michael. This is how you are going to die, in the mouth of a whale," Packard thought.
But the cetacean finally surfaced, shook its head, and spat it out.
"He just threw me into the water. There was white water everywhere,"
said Packard, who was initially rescued by his crewmate on the boat in which they had arrived.
Charles Mayo, a whale expert at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, told the local Cape Cod Times that
human-whale encounters are rare.
Humpback whales are not aggressive, and Mayo believes it was accidental at a time when the whale was feeding on fish, probably ammoditids.
