If I was asked to rank the whale-centric stories and videos that we've passed along this year, I'd have a tough time hammering out actual rankings.

We've seen videos that range from beautiful and majestic to sad, plus stories and videos that went from scary to stunning.

Suffice to say though, that this one would immediately jump to the top of the list.

After all, it's not every day that we get video of a huge humpback whale nearly swallowing a kayaker.

Yes, you read that right.

But, let's back up a step first and look back at what we've seen so far in 2020.

Back in June we got some majestic aerial video of a humpback whale in the waters off Manasquan.

Just a few days later, we saw sad video of the valiant but ultimately unsuccessful attempts by Spring Lake lifeguards to save a beached whale.

There was the story of the whale that nearly capsized a boat in the Seaside Park adjacent waters, video of the incident surfaced about two months later.

There was also another whale vs. boat video from the Sea Isle area waters this past summer, too.

This one might take the cake though, as a pair of California kayakers got the scare of a lifetime when a humpback whale seemed like it was taking a page from the Pinocchio playbook by trying to swallow them whole.

I'm not even going to try to describe what happened, nothing that I can say will do it justice like seeing it for yourself will.

Warning: graphic language in the below video.

But wait, that's not the only video, here's an even closer look:

Right??

Thankfully (and frankly amazingly), the YouTube page for the video says that, "...The whale released them and both survived and were unharmed".

Suffice to say, 2020 has truly been a whale of a year!