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RYE, N.H. (WHDH) - A whale flipped a 23-foot boat, knocking two people overboard off the coast of Rye, N.H. Tuesday morning.
The Coast Guard responded to two mayday calls reporting a capsized boat about half a nautical mile east of Odiorne Point State Park, near Portsmouth.
The men ejected into the water said they were bait fishing near Gunboat Shoals at around 7:30 a.m. when a breaching whale slammed into their boat without warning.
“It’s was a harrowing experience, but you can see from the video exactly what happened. The whale came up, landed on our transom, the boat kind of came up like this, the front’s in the air, and then turned over,” said boater Greg Paquette.
Paquette said fellow boater Ryland Kenney jumped out before the boat had fully flipped over.
“And so, he leapt away from boat as it was going sideways, and I was kind of underneath the front of the boat,” Paquette said.
His lifejacket inflated and he crawled out from underneath the vessel, Paquette said.
“I’ll tell you, we were lucky, we were really lucky,” he said.
Kenney said the whole ordeal happened in the span of a few seconds.
“I was probably about 3 feet from the whale’s head, and I saw him come up and open his mouth, I think that’s when I was like ‘whoa’ and his mouth closed and it crunched the engine,” Kenney said.
The whale is believed to be a humpback weighing an estimated 40 tons.
“Like Greg said, the bow went up, and it started tilting over, and I kind of didn’t know what to do. I was kind of on the side when the boat was coming up, kind of ‘Superman’d’ off the side of the boat and just went in,” Kenney said.
Wyatt Yager, 19, and his 16-year-old brother Colin, who were out fishing on another boat, sped over and helped the two men out of the water.
“Just complete shock, so I just dropped everything and just started driving over to them,” Wyatt said. “They swam around to the back and climbed up the ladder.”
No injuries were reported and Paquette and Kenney were taken to Great Bay Marine, authorities said. Cell phone video shows the boat being righted and towed back to shore.
“It didn’t really feel like there was any risk to go help them. It just felt like what we had to do,” Colin said.
The whale appeared uninjured after the incident, according to the Coast Guard. Experts said the young whale was likely feeding on the horde of bait fish in the area at the time.
“I have never seen a whale intentionally hit a boat before. That’s why I think it was just feeding,” said Dianna Schulte, of the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation. “The fishermen probably knew that there was a whale around and that’s why they were fishing, because they wanted to catch some of the same fish that the whales were going after.”
Pete Reynolds, the owner of Granite State Whale Watch, said boaters should watch out for whales, as the animals are not always aware of boats.
“If you do see feeding whales you definitely want to give them their space. They’re here to feed, that’s what their mind is on,” Reynolds said.
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