We saved a whale!!!!!!!!!!

Well it was a pretty full-on weekend. The highlight being saving a whale. I couldn’t believe it! We were coming back from out overnight fishing trip when I saw a large fin in the water with a tail making rather big splashes. I said to the others “look at that, what the hell is that” and we stopped to take a closer look. We wandered down onto the sandy beach and a guy headed towards us saying he’d been watching it for a while and it couldn’t get anywhere. It was quite a way out (estuary) and from the beach we couldn’t tell whether it was a small whale or a dolphin so we waded towards it. There were lots of rocks on the way and a few stubbed toes but we got out to it about hip height. Being an estuary it stayed quite shallow so we tried to find a deeper direction to push it in. The poor thing, it was a pilot whale between 3-4 metres long and it had quite a few scars and deep holes. It was surprisingly hard to find anything to grip, and we were about to go and find a towel to wrap around it when all the pushing started to pay off.

It could tell we were trying to help it and it would start flapping its tail which we were careful about keeping away from. And when we’d stop, she (one of the guys found her sex by accident) would stop flapping too.

It was pretty unreal to be trying to push a whale into the deeper water. Once we got her moving, all effort was put in to keep her moving and she soon got deep enough to help herself. We watched it silence as she swam away and then in pity as she turned and swam towards the beach again. We were in a big bay with the point quite a long way again. We headed over to her and this time she wasn’t quite so stuck so it took less effort to get her moving again. In all she beached around 4-5 times but we were moving towards the point (over some very sharp shells and rocks that left a deep cut in my heel) so were headed in the right direction. Once she hit deep enough water she could really get some speed up. A couple of times she headed towards the beach and then would turn out into the open water again. My biggest fear was she would turn right back into where she started from but we were lucky.

The last push was by the point and she was gone. A very cool moment as we watched her build up speed and then disappear under the water.

 

It was a long wade back to the beach; we couldn’t walk up onto the point as the oyster shells were extremely sharp on our already sore feet. We all felt very lucky and at the same time sad to have such an opportunity, I only hope she wasn’t struggling too long before we helped her and really hope she didn’t beach again on the way to the open seas.

 

Other than saving a whale, I caught 3 snapper on Saturday, the last one being quite big. We stayed on a beautiful sandy beach, greg and I camped while the other two stayed on the boat. On the Sunday we went sea biscuiting (SOOO much fun). B was driving the boat and he’d make the biscuit shoot over the boats wake and skim onto the glassy clear water. Greg crashed off at high speed which was hilarious. I even saw a couple of penguins on the way. We also went snorkelling and then back to the mussel farm for some more fishing. Greg got given great shit for not even catching one that we could eat.

In all we got about 8 snapper and a couple of yellow tails that we used as bait.

 

We didn’t get home till about 7 Sunday night and were very tired cleaning all the boat gear but it was a very cool weekend and the smoked snapper for tea was very tasty.

 

Oh yeah since this is suppose to be about weight-loss, I did weigh myself and came in at 68.4kg which seemed a bit light. I did get very inebriated the night before (so so drunk on the Friday out in town) so maybe I was super dehydrated when I weighed myself the next morning. The wkends eating not very healthy but we did a lot of exercise and this morning my arms are quite sore from the combination of pushing whale and hanging on for dear life on the sea biscuit.