Beached whales at Port Levy, Banks Penninsular

As usual the photos are in reverse order, with the writing at the bottom - grrrrrrr

At this point Lucy and I are looking at the whales and she is telling me all about what happened. She is over being scared of them, finally.

Just before we left more people had gathered... the bulldozer is pulling the last of the whales up onto the grass

Lucy, Soleil and Megane checking out the whales

We are wearing gloves here because they started to leak "fluids" out of their mouths, anus' and spouts and the DOC (Department of Conservation) workers were afraid of spreading whale diseases (not sure to who... we don't usually hang with whales, and I don't know that fish diseases really affect people, but we did as we were told)

I found this really sad. The little whale was pulled up onto the grass early on. When the larger whale was dragged up her fin got caught in the mouth of the little whale and that caused her to be dragged further up the grassy bank. I was just so.... undignified for the poor whales.

The biggest whale was about 5m long

Two of the baby whales (we don't know the little boy in the photo)

I'm not sure what we are so darn happy about, but this is a nice photo of my pretty friend Soleil :) So glad you came Soleil! and I am also glad that you *were on the news* (shame about the tooth though)

If you look closely in this picture you can see, just above the corner of the whale's mouth... her eye. They do not seem to have eyelids as they all had their eyes "open". (double click on the photo to make it bigger)

The baby whales were carried up from the edge of the beach, the bigger whales were dragged up by their tails (and a rope/chain) and a tractor

As you can see by Murra's face, it was quite traumatic when we first arrived...

Lucy is not happy about the whales (and she is also very carsick)

Port Levy, Banks Penninsular (about 1hr30 from Christchurch). You can kind of see in this picture how the whales got stranded. The beach has a very gradual slope out to deep water - at least 200m. This is what we saw when we first arrived.

Sunday 24 Jan 2010 - I read a report of a pod of 48 whales beached at Port Levy and help was needed to keep them alive until they could be put back out to sea... We picked up Soleil and headed straight over there (and got hideously car sick on the way due to the windy, hilly road). By the time we got there over 30 of the whales had been floated back out into the harbour and the head female rounded everyone up and headed out to sea. The Project Jonah scientist that we spoke to said that Pilot Whales have great sonar for rocky beaches, but in mud their sonar doesn't work at all well, and the evening before they had been feeding madly on the fish in the bay and didn't realize that they were trapped in a really shallow bay until the tide went out and they were stranded. As is typical of whales, when they realized some were struggling they all stayed on the beach and would have died if they were not taken back out to sea. All of the 16 dead whales were female, and the babies were only a week or two old. The dead whales were protected overnight by Project Jonah workers and the local iwi, and then some might be used for research but all will be farewelled and buried by the local maori. It was of course sad, but amazing to see them up close. I don't know if we will ever have a chance to see whales like this again.