COLUMN: The Maritime Safety Authority and work safe officials are being understandably tight-lipped about the exact circumstances of the tragedy at Kaikōura two weeks ago which claimed the life of five people while out in a charter boat nature watching.
But the event does bring home what mariners have known for centuries, that whales can be dangerous creatures. And our country’s maritime history peppered with stories of whales wrecking boats to prove it.
Within 30 years of Captain James Cook’s arrival, shore-based whalers had established all around our coastline. Fortunes got made from the high demand for lamp and lubricating oils which whale flesh is saturated with.
But it was downright dangerous work being out there amongst the beasts.
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Old-time whalers referred to the whale’s flukes as the ‘hand of god’. One slap, and you went straight to meet your maker.
The Ann Alexander was one whaling ship from New Bedford, Massachusetts, that was notable for being rammed and sunk by a wounded sperm whale in the South Pacific on August 20, 1851, some 30 years after the far more famous incident when another Yankee whaler, the Essex, was stove in and sunk by the whale it was hunting.
The remarkable man-versus-beast sage inspired Hermann Melville to write Moby Dick, his first edition coming out just five months after the Essex going down, his book attracting great acclaim in both London and New York.
The plot based on the true story showed once again that truth can be much stranger than fiction.
A great, yet little known postscript to the Essex story was that the whale, still affected by its two harpoon wounds and pieces of timber from the ramming attack which had embedded in its forehead, was killed five months later by the crew of the Rebecca Simms, the ‘errant animal’ yielding exactly 80 barrels of oil.
Putting all provocations aside, so called ‘accidental’ collisions of whales with small ships and yachts are common too throughout the South Pacific.
The Union sunk in 1807 after ‘colliding’ with a sperm whale in the middle of the night.
Well appreciated by mariners around this time was that a whale was capable of sinking a wooden vessel which was six, even eight times its own weight.
You can still talk to any oceangoing yachtie today, and it isn’t usually too long before they bring up the known risk of a random collision with a whale, or overboard shipping containers for that matter, which if they don’t sink, usually float barely breaking the surface, just one pointed corner sticking slightly protruding, plain deadly.
But in comparison with errant containers, whale/boat incidents are far more common, recorded at least every decade or so.
In January, 2007, when yachtsman Lindsay Wright, 52, had to be airlifted to safety going between Auckland and New Plymouth when his 10m-long trimaran Loose Goose collided with a humpback whale which left his trimaran hull with a gaping hole.
As the hull filled with water, Wright raced on deck to observe the whale nosing back up and playing under the boat before swimming off to rejoin its pod of six or so others.
Only a year before, an Auckland couple with sleeping kids aboard had their 15m fibreglass luxury launch struck by a whale in the early hours of the morning off Cape Brett, shortly after observing breaching whales nearby.
Their boat sunk in minutes, the family just managing to get off in their inflatable and alert the Coastguard.
Obviously, we still have a bit more to learn about predicting whale behaviour, but what has been observed about aggression in male cetacean/whales suggests that head-butting is a basal instinct, explaining the evolution of protective, bulbous foreheads on some whale species.
But it’s not only ramming that mariners have to watch for.
Breaching, where the whale suddenly jumps out of the water to often land back down on the surface with a terrific displacement slap, can have disastrous consequences if performed alongside your usual pleasure craft or small charter vessel.
Anecdotal reports suggest this happened in the latest tragedy.
Kaikōura is a known hang-out sanctuary for sperm whales.
One of my takeaways from guides over my multiple whale watching trips is how most of the resident sperm whales around Kaikōura are only seasonal residents, the younger more exuberant teenager ‘hoon whales’, which are sensibly dropped off every year by the migrating herds, picked up the following year.
‘A showoff bunch of troublemakers’, I recall how one guide summed them up. We were out there to have some fun with the whales.
It was the refining the first mineral oils from ‘oil springs’ in Ontario in 1858 which saw the demise of the whaling industry, the heyday largely over by 1860.
Tough entrepreneurs persisted, the last whale harpooned in this country harpooned off northern Kaikōura on December 21, 1964, taken by Trevor Norton out of the Perano Whaling Station, situated just inside Tory Channel.
The Perano family were effective whale killers, mainly because they pioneered the use of speedboats in New Zealand, powering their sleek kauri planked craft with turbocharged six-cylinder GM diesels capable of generating 350 Hp, giving them the ability to reach 40 knots.
Under the deck mounted with bronze harpoon cannon was furled 300 fathoms of rope attached to the harpoon, in case the whale sounded.
The boat was also divided into three watertight compartments in case the whale retaliated.
Basic wisdom, and everyone who worked in the industry knew it, whales were capable of anything, regardless of being provoked or not.
No doubt our Marine Safety Authority will in due course have some recommendations about this latest tragedy at Kaikōura.
We must never forget what a cruel place the sea can be, a place we experience entirely at our own risk, particularly where whales lurk.
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