Randy Thornton’s swimming adventure earlier this month was skewed after one of his fellow swimmers, a humpback whale, flipped its tail. The 50-year-old diver had to be hospitalized for a broken femur at HealthSouth Rehabilitation Center in Sandy. The incident happened on March 1 during an excursion trip in the Dominican Republic. Thornton and 17 other divers were on the last dive of the last day of their weeklong trip to the reefs called the Silver Banks, an area where divers are allowed to swim with humpback whales. The whales are playful and they “slow down and let you catch up with them,” explains Thornton, who called his mishap just a bizarre accident. “I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Thornton, the owner of a dive shop, Dive Addicts, in Draper, told the Desert news.
Recalling the incident to the Desert news, Thornton said the accident happened when the water current washed him and other divers too close to a mother whale who had a calf sleeping on her top.
“The calf woke up and got spooked, and that startled the mother, who swished her big tail twice,” Thornton said, adding that he was hit and his femur broke “like a twig.”
However, this was not the end of the adventure. Thornton’s diving buddies made a splint out of fins and a weight belt and after nine-hours of rough journey he landed in a “prehistoric” hospital where the surgeons used a sledge hammer to pound a steel rod into his leg.
