Whale of a tale
David Salazar was running a fishing boat off the California coast earlier this week when he saw something strange. He had seen lots of fish and big turtles and other sea life, but this thing was as big as a truck. In fact, it turned out to be bigger than his whole boat. The crew migrated to the rail as the massive beast kind of floated alongside. It was a whale, but this whale was not looking to eat a ship or the crew, this whale had a problem. It was tangled in several nets and ropes and it could hardly swim as its fins were captured and even its tail was weighted down with some abandoned traps from the floor of the ocean. “Once we saw it was a whale trapped in the net, we obviously started trying to figure out how to get the whale out,” said Salazar. That’s when he made the decision to try to free the aquatic beast.
When the crew got a hook and some line and started to try to free the whale, it got nervous and tried to swim away from the ship. Apparently, the whale decided these guys were not trying to harm it and drifted back to their poking on the restrictions around its body. “We got a hold of the net, the whale kind of started moving around, acting kind of weird, and then all the sudden she kind of figured out that we were trying to help her and she literally calmed down and just let us do what we had to do,” said Salazar. They could not really get very close to the massive body and pulling on the nets with the hook was not doing much good. So a couple of the guys make the big decision to get in the water with the whale. This is pretty dangerous because one swish of its tail and they could be crushed against the boat. Fortunately, the whale remained passive and seemed to go with the program. They first cut off the traps caught on the wide tail and that seemed to wake up the struggling beast. Then they cut some more of the ropes and the whale backed away from the boat with the crew hanging on to the net with the hook at the whale’s head. It took about 15 minutes, but the whale finally slipped out of the net over its head and could swim free. Salazar said in his twenty-plus years of fishing, he’s never experienced anything like this. “We’ve untangled a bunch of turtles. We find turtles all the time tangled up in abandoned long lines and stuff, but we’ve never untangled a whale, so that was pretty cool,” he said. Salazar said the whale circled the boat a couple of times after being freed, breaching a couple of times as if to say “Thanks” then headed south.
Tales of Whales
My wife has a whale tattooed on her belly. It used to be a dolphin.
Around 50 million years ago, whales lived on land. Until some of them decided to go back to the sea.
The rest of them stayed on land and shop at Walmart.
Due to controversy some animals have been renamed:
· The great white shark is now the above average Caucasian shark to ease racial tension.
· The blue whale is now known as the Happy Plus Size to counter talks about Blue being a depressive color and because whale is fat phobic.
· The black panther is now known as the Panther of Color as calling it black while it is an aggressive creature is racist.
How do you get banned from Sea World?
Free Willy.
August 2nd Birthdays
1980 – Nadia Bjorlin, 1993 – Cassidy Gifford, 1964 – Mary Louise Parker, 1991 – Skylar Diggins
1978 – Edward Furlong, 1948 – Dennis Prager, 1981 – Sam Worthington, 1924 – James Baldwin