THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, February 28, 1996 TAG: 9602280377
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY LANE DEGREGORY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: OREGON INLET LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
Freddy the 40-foot fin whale has finally had his funeral.
Coast Guard crews Tuesday towed the body of the 40-ton marine mammal from a sandbar inside this Outer Banks inlet to the Gulf Stream about 50 miles offshore.
The whale got stuck on the Pamlico Sound sandbar in 3 feet of water Feb. 5 and died after spending three days struggling to free itself.
Coast Guard officials had planned to try to sink the enormous carcass, which filled with gas and began to float last week, by shooting it. But they changed their minds. At 2 p.m. they towed it off the sandbar, and late in the evening were preparing to let it float away into a watery grave.
``That whale will be sent adrift. We'll not try to sink it,'' Coast Guard spokeswoman Joan Belk said from her Hatteras Island outpost. ``It will be a hazard to navigation, though. And we'll issue the proper warnings.
``Soon, it will be outside of the shipping lanes entirely.''
Coast Guardsman Ross Fowle was on the 41-foot boat that towed Freddy out to sea. He said Coast Guard personnel on a 21-foot vessel tied a 1,200-foot line around the whale's tail, then pulled the animal about 400 feet into deeper water of the Oregon Inlet channel. There, they shortened the line to 100 feet and passed it off to men on the bigger boat, who towed the carcass beneath the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge, through the inlet, and out to the deeper waters of the Atlantic.
``It was tough getting that whale off the sandbar at first. But once we got it off the shoal and into about six feet of water, it floated on its own, pretty much, and wasn't hard work,'' Fowle said. ``We towed it about five miles, to about two-and-a-half miles east of the bridge. Then, we transferred it to an 82-foot Coast Guard boat from Virginia at about 4:30 p.m. That bigger boat was taking it all the way to the Gulf Stream.''
With the tide coming in, Fowle said, the Coast Guardsmen couldn't travel more than 5 mph. About seven Coast Guard personnel from the Oregon Inlet station helped take Freddy back to sea. The Coast Guard didn't charge the National Marine Fisheries Service for towing the whale. And Coast Guard officials said they didn't know yet how much the trip cost taxpayers.
Coast Guardsmen from the Oregon Inlet station said they were sad when the whale died - but rather relieved to get rid of its big body, which had been stuck inside the channel for more than three weeks.
``We were kind of glad it was over with,'' Fowle said.
Marine biologists don't know why the endangered animal swam into the shallow shoal. They estimated that Freddy was between 3 and 5 years old. This probably was the first year the whale was swimming without its mother and was trying to make it on its own, they said.
Scientists had hoped to tow Freddy's body to the Navy's Dam Neck training center in Virginia Beach so that they could perform a necropsy - animal autopsy - on the whale and determine why it died. But after naval officers told biologists at the National Marine Fisheries Service that they would have to absorb at least part of the costs of bringing the animal to shore and burying it, fisheries officials decided not to bother. Navy Natural Resource Specialist Jimmi Bonavita said it cost about $5,000 just to bury a whale that washed ashore on Dam Neck's beach several years ago.
``The Coast Guard agreed to tow the whale up here for free. And we were willing to absorb the costs of our equipment and personnel, because we said we would,'' Bonavita said Tuesday from his Virginia Beach office. ``But we would've been charged by Norfolk Naval Base's public works department to bring two very large bulldozers up here. And we would've needed a landing craft just to get that whale from the Coast Guard boat onto our beach. The main problem would've been getting it the last one-and-a-half miles from the surf to the shore. So we asked the National Marine Fisheries Service to reimburse us for those costs.
``Towing a whale of that size and weight 100 miles and then trying to bury it is a massive job,'' said Bonavita. ``It's like trying to move and bury a big building.''
Teri Rowles, a biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service, said scientists have taken several samples from Freddy's body and have monitored its deterioration.
``We haven't analyzed the samples yet. They will be shipped to our Seattle lab. And it will be several months yet before any analysis can be done,'' Rowles said from her Silver Spring, Md., office. ``We're very interested, still, in what the samples from this animal may show us.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
DREW C. WILSON/The Virginian-Pilot
Coast Guard vessels haul the carcass of Freddy the fin whale through
Oregon Inlet on Tuesday. The whale got stuck on a sandbar Feb. 5 and
died after spending three days struggling to free itself.
by CNB