Footage has captured the incredible moment an Aussie wind surfer crashed into a whale as it launched itself from the ocean.
Hair-raising footage filmed on a GoPro action camera showed the moment the juvenile humpback hurled itself out of the water and hit Newport man Jason Breen as he was windsurfing off the coast of Mona Vale Beach in Sydney’s north.
Mr Breen, 55, toppled underneath the graceful whale and was briefly pushed underwater as his leg rope snapped.
One dramatic moment from the clip showed the humpback from underwater before Mr Breen swam to safety. He emerged from the incident unscathed.
“It came down, landed straight on me and got caught in my leash,” he told Channel 9.
“It probably dragged me 20 or 30 feet under. To be honest, I thought it was all over, then I felt my leash break and I thought, ‘Thank god’ and came up to the top.”
Mr Breen said he believed it was the baby whale’s smaller size and shorter life in the ocean that helped him to survive.
“It was a big calf, if it had barnacles I would have been ripped apart because the whale’s body was beside me the whole time,” he said.
While the mesmerising close-up footage was captured by Mr Breen himself, another local, Paul Netteback, was also filming the incident by pure chance.
“I wanted to keep filming but then I thought someone might have just died, so I stopped filming and I got triple-0 ready,” Mr Netteback said of his own footage, captured from farther away.