A video captured by teen brothers of a large humpback whale capsizing a fishing boat and throwing two men in the ocean Tuesday morning in Rye has gone viral.
Wyatt Yager, 19, of Maine, told news outlets he and his brother Colin, 16, were fishing for pogies off Odiorne Point around 7 a.m. Colin spotted the whale about an hour later and began recording, with his video showing Wyatt steering the boat before a whale behind them jumps from the water with its mouth open. As the whale’s mouth closes, it flops over onto the rear of another fishing boat behind them
The Yagers’ video, reposted on X, had close to six million views as of Wednesday, with a caption that read, “There is a pissed off whale patrolling the waters in Portsmouth, NH today. Head on swivel if you’re out there.”
Sara Morris of the University of New Hampshire Shoals Marine Laboratory said the whale was not actually upset, but likely lunge feeding.
“I think one of the key things is that when whales are sighted to encourage boaters to keep their distance,” Morris said in a statement. “The whales are moving around underwater and coming up, potentially in an area different from where they went down, and we want to give them as much leeway as we possibly can to avoid a situation like what you see here.”
The comments on social media blew up. Some expressed shock. Others posted memes.
“Kid’s like ‘I want to go home now,’”one user wrote.
“This is more catastrophic than my dating life,” another person wrote.
Nobody was hurt in the ordeal and the whale was uninjured. The two people thrown from the boat were Greg Paquette of Groveland and Ryland Kenney of Dover.
The teens stopped the video and helped pull both fishermen into their boat just after the whale left the area. The men credited them with saving their lives.
“We’re glad they took such quick action,” Paquette told Seacoastonline. “They didn’t even think about it. We’re really grateful to both of them.”
Paquette remembers seeing the whale’s large head before it hit the engine of the boat.
“Then I saw the whole stern become inundated with water and I thought, ‘Oh no. We’re going down. We’re going to sink now’,” Paquette told Seacoastonline.
Paquette and Kenney jumped horizontally off their boat and quickly swam away from the area.
“It’s been an emotional day,” Paquette said.
The Yager brothers brought the men to a nearby friend’s vessel before the Coast Guard arrived, according to Wyatt Yager.
