Two friends were fishing a few hundred yards off the New Jersey Shore about noon this past Monday, on a 23-foot center console in about 25 feet of water. Then a humpback whale suddenly breached, hit their boat, and threw them into the water.
They had seen whales earlier in the day, but they didn’t see this one. “It came out of nowhere,” Jay DeBenedict, 62, told the Toms River Shorebeat. “This whale breached and I thought he was going to land in the middle of the boat. He hit right against the T-top.”
DeBenedict and his friend, Robert Riley, then found themselves in the water next to the whale. For a few seconds, DeBenedict said, he actually was standing on top of the whale, until he pushed away.
The two men swam back to the boat, which had righted itself. They were able to start the engine and the bilge pump, but water was up to their knees. Barnegat Inlet was ten miles away, and that was much too far. So they headed for the beach and ran the boat up on the sand. A pickup truck with a trailer took it away later in the day.
Robert Schoelkopf, director of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center, said the boat was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. “After it broke the surface with a mouth full of fish,” he told The New York Post, “it had to land and the boat was in the way.” He also said, “We warn boaters it’s not just them out there fishing. It’s the whales fishing as well.” Read more:
