Whale Slams Into Boat, Knocking Passengers Unconscious, Badly Injuring Tourists and Crew

A humpback whale slammed into a charter fishing boat off the coast of Australia Saturday, injuring passengers and crew, authorities said.

The force of the impact threw the 28-foot boat into the air, knocking two men unconscious, reported the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Monday.

The vessel, which was carrying five tourists and three crew members, was returning from a fishing expedition near the Whitsunday Islands on Australia's northeastern coast when the collision occurred.

The captain of the vessel, Oliver Galea, received eight stitches for a deep cut on his forehead. He said that the whale started breaching underneath the vessel and knocked everyone over in "a split second."

"He's [the whale] come up—or she—and she's thrown the boat up in the air with a bit of a twist and dislodged everyone off their feet within half a second," Galea told ABC.

"Nobody hears of it—it's not something that happens commonly—it's just one-off, one in a million.

"It happened so fast, we didn't know what we hit or what happened—then we saw a whale in the distance behind us."

One passenger was hospitalized with severe facial injuries, two suffered broken ribs, and a third had a broken nose.

The boat's co-owner, Rachel Carpenter, who was not on the vessel at the time of the impact, said it was a "miracle" no one had been killed.

"There could have been so many worse scenarios; they're so lucky they landed upright in the water and the boat wasn't capsized and nobody was thrown out of the boat," she told local media.

The Whitsundays is considered a whale nursery, with the mammals choosing the warm coastal waters to give birth to their calves.

A Department of Environment and Heritage told ABC: "These huge, unpredictable mammals may surface, slap their tails or leap out of the water unexpectedly around vessels.

"Skippers need to keep a lookout at all times—even if skippers avoid cutting across the path of a whale or going within the approach limits, humpbacks may approach or nudge boats.

"If a skipper becomes concerned about the safety of their vessel and passengers due to a whale's behavior, he/she should stop, slow down and/or steer away from the whale immediately."

Human fatalities and injuries in encounters with whales are highly rare, with recent incidents mainly involving collisions between the animals and vessels that have moved closer to them than the 295 feet recommended by experts.

In 2003, a 3-year-old was killed when a humpback whale collided with a whale-spotting boat off the coast of Hawaii.