A humpback whale created quite the scene on Tuesday when it surfaced, landed on a boat off the New Hampshire coast, and threw two people into the ocean.
While the idea seems improbable, the moment was caught on camera and has quickly gone viral on social media.
One video reshared by the New York Times showed watchers on another boat quickly scrambling to get out of the way after the whale surfaced and knocked the men into the ocean. The video was captured by 19-year-old Wyatt Yager and his 16-year-old brother, Colin.
The Times shared that while the whale landed on the boat, capsizing it, the passengers were rescued by the United States Coast Guard without injury.
Gregg Paquette of Groveland, New Hampshire, one of the men aboard the boat, spoke with WCVB about the incident, saying they had been watching the whale but had lost sight of it.
“We didn’t see him for a couple of minutes, and then the next thing we knew, he popped up and landed right on the transom of the boat,” Paquette said.
Also on board the boat was Ryland Kenney of Dover, who shared that he saw no way out other than going into the drink.
“I just looked up and just kind of saw the boat tipping, and I said, ‘The only way to avoid this is to just kind of jump horizontally away,’” Kenney said.
Thankfully, the Yager brothers were able to help the men after they were ejected from their vessel, as they witnessed the entire thing happen just yards away.
“I saw it come up, and I was just like, ‘Oh, it’s going to hit the boat,’ and then it kind of started to flip,” Yager said.
Kenney said everything happened in “slow motion,” adding that it felt “like a movie.”
While one of the men jumped into the ocean and the other was thrown overboard, the Yagers moved their boat quickly and eventually helped pull the men out of the water.
“Truly grateful to them,” Paquette shared. “They were making the video, dropped everything, zoomed right over, and plucked us out.”