Sea kayakers connect with dying whale

Coeur d’Alene-based sea kayaking guides connected in a personal if not spiritual way to a baby whale destined to die on a Mexico beach.

“I’ll never forget the look in that eye,” said Michelle Darnell, back in the ROW Adventures office last week.

She was working in January with kayaking guides Chris Garcia and Sam Morrison during a ROW Sea Kayak Adventures three-day trip to absorb the natural history in the famous gray whale mating and birthing waters of Magdalena Bay.

Guests had booked the trip to bask in sunshine, paddle in ultra-blue ocean waters and observe gray whale cows close-up in nursery lagoons with their newborn calves.

For no extra charge, they also got a front- row seat to a serious marine mammal drama.

The group was returning to base camp from a hike through the dunes of Santo Domingo, a low, sandy barrier island on the Pacific side of Baja Mexico when three independent paddlers from Montana alerted them about a beached whale.

“The calf was at least 600 feet from the ocean at this point, and being a 15-foot, one-ton animal, things looked pretty bleak,” said Garcia, who’s still in Mexico.

The young whale had become stranded during one of the highest tides of the season. There was no chance of water coming in that high again in time to naturally reunite the whale with the ocean before it succumbed.

As scavenger birds were checking out the area, the circle of life appeared to be making another loop.

The guides made contact by cell phone with a Mexican environmental protection group and got tips on what they could do, but no agency was set up to respond.

“There aren’t a lot of resources to reach out to,” Darnell said, “and we were largely unprepared for whale rescue.”

They combed the beach for trashed plastic buckets, milk jugs and soda bottles that had washed ashore to fill with ocean water they would haul up the beach to wet the whale.

A local fisherman provided a blanket to wet and protect the calf from the baking sun.

“It’s a powerful thing to see and touch a creature that big struggling for its life,” Darnell said.

“But it was a pretty hopeless situation.”

Darnell led the tour guests back to camp and the other sea kayakers went their way, but Garcia and Morrison pitched a tent and stayed by the whale.

They named her Debra, the name of Jenny’s sister, who works at JC Penney in one of their favorite songs by Beck.

“We poured water on her and kept any wandering scavengers from picking at her,” Garcia said. “As the sun was setting, Sam and I were the only ones left with the calf.”

The next high tide was 11 p.m., but the lapping waves fell far short of the previous tide that had ushered Debra so high on the beach.

“Our hearts sank,” Garcia said.

“As I stared deeply into Debra’s eye I saw something familiar, almost human, and I think that’s what gave us hope.

“Sam and I were doing everything we could to keep Debra alive throughout the night, giving her water and keeping her company.”

At 7 a.m., the young whale was in rough shape. Her eye was dry and bleeding.

“We started a marathon of laps to the ocean to keep her wet with our buckets,” Garcia said. “We then started to dig a lagoon around her, in hope that the next tide at 11 a.m. would be a little higher.

“In the end this digging nonsense proved useless,” he said, explaining the first waves immediately filled the trench with sand.

“It was just something to keep our minds off the fact that Debra was going to die.”

Darnell brought Garcia and Morrison breakfast from camp at 8:30 a.m. The Montanans also returned to join the effort to keep the whale wet.

“I was a little surprised she made it through the night, but she was still breathing – and moaning,” Darnell said.

“We were running back and forth to the water just trying to do anything to possibly help.”

They were buoyed by a cell phone call from Vladimir de La Toba, a local Mexican kayaking guide who’d heard about the problem. Vlady, as they call him, also guides for ROW and is involved in a sea turtle conservation program. He said he was on his way with three other volunteers and an ATV.

They jury-rigged the blanket and a rope into a harness and used the ATV and muscle power to get the calf as close to the water as possible.

Almost there, the nine people pooled their strength to roll the whale toward the weak incoming tide.

“I was in the center, right next to the pectoral fins, one of which apparently had broken when Debra was initially beached,” Garcia said. “I was in charge of keeping that fin in place through each rotation.

“We were sweating immensely,” he said. The cool Pacific water that finally splashed on them was refreshing, and encouraging.

The whale offered the first hint in 24 hours that it could survive when the first wave crashed against her skin.

A few more rolls and she was floating.

Vlady grabbed her by the mouth and turned her head-first toward the ocean. Garcia held her injured fin and pushed.

“All of a sudden her tail began to flap as if she had never been beached,” Garcia said. “She took off into the ocean!”

The rescuers’ beach celebration of hugging and high-fiving lasted only seconds as they saw the disoriented whale turn and head back toward the beach.

Vlady and Garcia went into the surf and turned the whale back four different times before swimming her away to where she finally headed out to sea.

“They made a heroic effort to swim out a couple hundred yards risking getting hit with her powerful tail,” Darnell said.

The group celebrated again before it dawned on Darnell that this was more than an Inland Northwest paddlers’ equivalent of rescuing a moose calf from a hole in an ice-capped lake.

“Something about the whole experience weighed on us in different ways,” she said.

“As we walked back to camp, Sam and I stopped to stare at the ocean,” Garcia said. “We saw Debra, and she was with an adult whale.”

He admits he can’t be sure it was Debra’s mother, “but one would like to think so…. It was that almost-human look in the whale’s eye that gave me a special bond with her. We watched the two of them swim off. It was truly an unforgettable experience.”

“I’m inspired by the animal and the effort,” Darnell said. “It shows what you can do with hope in a hopeless situation.”

Garcia would like to think that if Debra survived a 24-hour beaching, maybe she can survive the challenges the ocean will present as she follows the spring migration route. Gray whales are beginning their annual journey north along the Pacific Coast to their summer pastures in the waters of Alaska.

Garcia plans to return to sunny Baja next winter to guide more sea kayaker whale-watching tours.

He also likes to think that he’ll spot a familiar gray up close, look it in the eye and know it’s Debra.

• See a video of the whale-saving effort.