ST. JOHN’S — It took hours of work with hoses, shovels — even the mayor on an excavator — but residents in the small Newfoundland town of Point May worked to bring two beached whales back into the water after they were stranded ashore Sunday.
The community effort drew dozens of helpers, including some from neighbouring communities, and it does appear to have given one of the whales a new lease on life. While one of the whales continued to struggle and later perished after it was brought back into the water, the other successfully swam out of sight.
“The excitement from people was just amazing,” said town councillor Matt Lamkin, who was one of the first from the community to start digging a trough.
“Everybody was cheering, saying about how much they loved the whales. The kids were saying ‘good luck, whales!’ and stuff like that. It was amazing to see.”
The animals had beached at high tide — around 8:30 that morning — so they were far inland when the town’s make-shift rescue began. Mayor Darren Harris brought out an excavator and estimates he dug a 40-foot trough, about seven feet deep, to tow the animals back out to the water.
“The community came together,” he said. “Everybody helped. There was no, you know, ‘I can’t do this, I can’t do that’, Everybody was ‘OK, what can I do?’”
Lamkin said the effort began when he and his children went down to the beach, noticed no one had started helping the animals, and began pouring some water on them.
“We could see that they were really responsive to the help that they were getting,” he said. “You could almost see the helplessness in their eyes.”
He went back to his own house to get some bigger buckets, and then noticed more of his neighbours started helping too.
Even some of the community’s children got involved, using small buckets of their own to splash water on the whales and try to alleviate the dehydration.
“We could tell that they were drying out and stuff,” said Lamkin. “But once we started spreading them with water, you could just see the hope returned to the whales’ eyes.”
“The kids were even digging little trenches to the ocean trying to get water to the whales,” Harris added. “So they had the idea down pat, they just never had the equipment.”
Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) officials were called and did observe the community effort, but Harris said they didn’t participate.
“After consulting with DFO, they weren’t going to do anything with it. I asked could we do something, and they said ‘well, we’re not going to stop it, but we’re not going to encourage you either’.”
That’s when Harris went and got his excavator and started digging. It was a bit of a race against time, as the group worked to free the whales before sunset.
They were towed by rope to the waterline, and then by boat a bit further.
“We couldn’t just leave the whales there and let them die,” Harris said. “Then you’re having kids watching the whales just perish there on the beach. And what comes later is going to be a rotting whale.”
Although one of the mammals didn’t survive the day, Lamkin said he and his fellow community members are proud they gave the other a second chance.
“The main thing was that we gave it another shot at life,” he said. “It’s a really small community, only 150 people so when you go to Google Point May now, at least we’re all coming up as heroes.”
