Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that there was a plan to blow the dead whale in South Australia up. Remember the whale that tourists were walking on when the white pointer sharks were feeding on it? Yep, well they went to explode it.

Now this was one of the more amusing things I’d read, especially because they apparently could not find any information about people blowing up dead whales. Have they never heard of the internet?

One of the most famous sites out there on the net is about the exploding of a dead whale! Go to www.yahoo.com and type in “exploding whale”, and the first links that appear are all relevant! Duh.

In any event, like the whale on the pages just mentioned, the police of South Australia also failed to achieve a successful detonation of the marine mammal. Instead of sinking it, they just put a dent in the side, and there is still a very large dead whale bobbing out there off the coast.

Those who ignore history are deemed to repeat it…

=====

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/2001/08/01/FFX3JUCKSPC.html

Blubber that just won’t go away

Wednesday 1 August 2001

Fierce white pointer sharks have been attacking it for more than a week and on Monday evening the South Australian bomb squad tried to make it go away, but a southern right whale off the coast remains defiantly afloat.

“This has never been attempted before, never in Australia,” said SA Transport’s Arndrae Luks, of the attempt to sink the rotting whale. “It may have been done elsewhere but we cannot find any evidence of it so it’s a learning curve for us.”

For the first week after its death from unknown causes the huge whale was a tourist attraction off Cape Jervis. Hundreds of locals and visitors chartered boats to watch up to 20 white pointer sharks feeding from it.

Last weekend the whale was towed four nautical miles from The Pages islands near Kangaroo Island where on Monday police divers inserted explosives in an attempt to sink it.

But before that the feeding sharks, which are protected, had to be shooed away, which meant the carcase had to be buzzed.

“We made absolutely sure (there were no white pointers around),” Mr Luks said. “We sped around and around the carcase in motor boats, driving anything away.”

A police diver then went into the whale, extracting an estimated four to five shopping bags full of entrails and inserting detonators of a strength sufficient to blow through a half-metre concrete wall.

Instead of opening up a hole that would fill with water and sink it, the explosion made a tiny dent.

The whale’s incredibly buoyant blubber and oil-filled bones absorbed the rest of the impact and yesterday the carcase was still bobbing around.

“What we have done is speed up the decomposition,” Mr Luks said. “It has enabled the sharks and other scavengers to get in there and do their job … they’re the garbage collectors of the sea.”

Experts estimate the whale, left unexploded, would have taken four months to rot away. With the help of this week’s blubbery implosion, the decomposition period has been reduced to several weeks.

Categories: Travel, Odyssey 2001