BARNEGAT BAY, N.J. — A passenger on board a boat floating near the Jersey Shore was thrown from the watercraft after a collision between it and a whale.

The crash was caught on camera.

A 20-foot-long minke whale died after the incident, which happened in Barnegat Bay on Aug. 2, NBC News reported.

A boater reported to the Marine Mammal Stranding Center (MMSC) that a motorboat had hit the whale.

The collision caused the boat to nearly capsize and threw a passenger into the water, NBC News reported.

The whale had been in the bay for about an hour before the incident and after the crash was found in shallow water on a sandbar.

Boat Captain Charlie Nunn told WCAU it was “a freak accident" and that the people on the boat that crashed with the whale were not “antagonizing the whale,” instead, was caused by the whale getting anxious and going into fight-or-flight mode.

“They’re not supposed to be in three feet of water,” Nunn told WCAU. “They keep bumping into something, it’s probably fight-or-flight for the poor thing.”

An eyewitness told WPVI that the whale was thrashing, trying to get to deeper water but couldn’t get there, adding that there appeared to be something physically wrong with it.

“It was really in distress. That’s when it would go under boats; it was a crazy experience,” Kim Mancini, who recorded the incident, told the news station.

“At this point, we really don’t have much to go on,” Jay Pagel, stranding coordinator at the center, said Sunday, according to The Associated Press. “The side of the animal that we were able to observe had no obvious marks on it that we could see. But again, our visibility was very limited.”

Crews are expecting to perform a necropsy on the whale to determine how it died. They had to wait until favorable tide conditions and the availability of heavy equipment to drag the whale from the sandbar, KYW reported.

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