Right Whale Surfer
Sydney, Australia – 38-year-old doctor & part-time surfer Bishan Rajapakse now has a big fish tale to tell. While surfing off the popular tourist site Bondi Beach, Rajapakse was knocked out cold by the flick of whale’s tail.
Rajapakse reported that he was with a group of surfers when a humpback whale surfaced. Initially, the group surreptitiously approached the whale out of curiosity. Rajapakse then explained that it appeared that the whale departed, but next thing it had resurfaced and he found himself off to its right.
“I just remember this magnificent whale slowly coming to the right of me and coming for another look,” he said. “I just kind of felt like talking to it like a dog or an animal, and say ‘hey’, that was it. Maybe it was giving me ‘high five’, I don’t know.”
It was then that the whale flipped its tail giving Rajapakse one righteous slap that rhymes with the word rich.
“When I got to him I saw there was this dark, black shadow and it was just massive,” he told Stuff.co.nz. “The whale was moving in like slow motion. It was beautiful and it breached and we could see the barnacles and it was slowly going up and down and turning and it actually made a noise. It was amazing.”
From this point, Rajapakse has to rely on others for an account of what happened next as he was out like a light. It took his friends roughly ten seconds to get him out of the water. Rajapakse wasn’t the only surfer displaced by the 40-ft humpback whale.
Rajapakse, a New Zealand doctor, suffered no injuries in the incident, reported the website.
“Contacting whales is not what it’s cracked up to be. They look nice and soft but I can’t remember contacting it. Maybe it contacted me,” he added.
An onlooker from the beach described the other surfers as being cast into the air like “skittles”.
The number of sightings of humpbacks is increasing. They are generally peaceful creatures, but due to their sheer size they do not know their strength and can injure people.
Source:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/08/whale-knocks-surfer-unconscious-tail-knocked-out_n_3561163.html
