2006 - Two whales, one male and one female, were washed up on the beach at Skegness near the Seacroft Golf Course.

The male whale was still alive and a team of workers frantically tried to keep it wet and breathing until high tide at 11.30pm, when it was released into the North sea.

The stranded whales are reported to be 20ft long northern bottle nosed whales.
Second whale washed up dead after rescue attempt seemed successful.

photo kindly supplied by James Gilbert East Lindsey District Council

The male whale has been found washed up on a local beach after what seemed like a successful release back into the sea the previous night!

British Divers Marine Life Rescue, a UK based organization who rescue stranded and sick cetaceans and other marine mammals, worked alongside staff from Natureland Seal Sanctuary and the Lincolnshire Fire and Rescue services. The team had to roll the whale over to ease pressure on its lungs, and keep the whale wet. At high tide, the whale was submerged in sea water and swam off into the North Sea.

This morning (Friday), the whale was found dead.

James Gilbert of the East Lindsey District Council said that a post mortem is currently (Friday afternoon) being carried out on the whale by the London Zoological Society. Mr Gilbert added that it was the responsibility of the ELDC council to remove the carcass, and that it would be taken to a local landfill site.

A spokesman from Skegness Natureland Seal Sanctuary said that whales are beginning to be a familiar sight on the Lincolnshire coastline.

The beaching of the whales follows the stranding of a sperm whale on Skegness beach back in February of this year. Story below.

news story date 15th/16th/17th Feb 2006
A Report of a Sperm whale being washed ashore in Skegness on North Shore beach February 15th 2006 was released and Skegness Video went to investigate. dead whale Skegness sands We arrived on scene at 11am. There were no officials just about a dozen onlookers.

We looked round the whale and saw what seemed to be lacerations in the snout area.
Already the creature was starting to smell of decay.
police interview about dead whale in Skegness
A police officer arrived to survey the dead whale. He took photos of it.
The officer agreed to be interviewed. He said that he had heard that the whale was still, but barely, alive when washed ashore early that morning. When he received reports of a creature being washed ashore, he assumed that it was going to be another porpoise as several of them had been found recently. He didn’t expect a whale!. The policeman said that it was the responsibility of East Lindsey Council to remove the body as soon as possible. I asked him how this may be done. The Officer replied that the last whale to be washed up was dragged onto a low loader and disposed of.

Photo: onlookers discussing dead whale on Skegness beach

The incident provoked much discussion amongst the onlookers. (Comments can be heard on the video) One onlooker speculated the weight of the whale to be about 20 ton.People were expressing sentiments about how sad it was for a whale to be grounded and die. A former fisherman replied that if this were a cod, no one would take any notice of it, nor express the same sentiments. The cod is just as important as the whale!An elderly local told us: “They say they lose their way, but they’ve been swimming about in that stuff [sea] for years! They don’t lose their way-there’s something that’s making them die!”You may find the videos unpleasant but please remember when viewing, Skegness Video does not create the scenes - it records what it sees and hears!

Day 1 Stranding of the Whale

Whale Washed Ashore in Skegness

Skegness Video
9 min 41 sec - Feb 15, 2006

Day 2 Post Mortem of the Whale

Veterinary pathologists from ZSL carried out the post mortem.
(The Natural History Museum records the data of strandings).
This is part of the UK Marine Mammal Stranding Project which is funded by Defra.

**WARNING**
This video is of post mortem procedures.
Some people may find these images upsetting.
You have the option NOT to play the video!

Day 3 Removal of the Whale

We arrived on scene at 10.00 am. The whale was quickly decomposing and was notably sagging compared to the tautness a couple of hours after the stranding.
The stench was sickening.
Trophy hunters had removed all but one tooth, and had
cut off the whale’s five foot penis.

Removal of Whale Skegness Beach
Skegness Video
13 min 10 sec - Feb 19, 2006

The following is an excellent article about the whale which was published in the Target, the local newspaper. It was written by Patrick Carnwarth, a former Fleet Street reporter.

Quote
Ignoble last journey for a noble giant

A huge whale which found its final resting place on Skegness beach attracted hundreds of residents and visitors.

For two days there was a continual stream of people trudging from North Shore Road along the path and beach to see and touch the 20-30 ton mass of 50ft long sperm whale.

One elderly man said he had lived here for 75 years but had never seen a whale on the beach before.

It was first seen early on Wednesday morning. It lay at right angles to the shore line, its great scarred head pointing to the sea to which it could not return.

Its gaping mouth showed a mountain range of teeth on its lower jaw, wrapped by its massive tongue and coughed up innards, mixing the grotesque with sadness.
Rank Odour

Many women held handkerchiefs over their noses to lessen the rank odour down wind of the corpse. Children reacted with excited amazement, wide-eyed as they walked round looking up the hillside of its flanks and some even climbing disrespectfully on its tail.

One little girl asked “How can we wake it up?”

But many adults were saddened into silence by the fate that had reduced such a magnificent mammal to a helpless end on a shore where it had no business to be.

The man responsible for dealing with the whale was Pat Fowler, head of environmental services at East Lindsey District Council. His first duty was to tell the Natural History Museum, whose rights to deal with stranded whales were transferred to them in 1913 from the monarchy which had laid claim to them since the 14th Century.

Mr Fowler’s team had to wait until Thursday afternoon for the arrival of a party from the Zoological Society of London, owners of London Zoo and the museum’s partners in cetacean research.

Mr Fowler was there to welcome Dr Paul Jepson and his assistants Rob Deaville and Matt Perkins.

By then the tide had shifted the whale further up the beach and turned it parallel with the shore line.

It was roped off to keep watchers back while the scientists took samples and made measurements.
Suffocated

Dr Jepson told The Target whales were often just alive when first stranded but then they were suffocated by their own weight.

Asked how long that would have taken he said “It could be a few minutes or a few hours.”

“Gas builds up inside the whale and literally blows out its guts,” he explained.

The long scars on its head had probably been inflicted by the teeth of rival males in fights, he added.

Dr Jepson quickly decided it was already too decomposed to do an autopsy. “That would make an awful mess,” he said.

“We will take samples of tissue, skin and blood. It is a young adult male, about full size.

“Samples of the blubber will show us what pollutants he has been exposed to and we can relate it to other samples in our collection.

“They all build up our knowledge of whales and the state of the sea.

Examining the blood will tell us any diseases he might have.”

As Dr Jepson’s scalpel dug into a chunk of blubber, hissing sounds gave aural evidence of the internal gas.

“You must not go too deep because you can get hit by an explosion. It has happened, although not to me.”

Rob Deaville ended one rumour – that someone had stolen the whale’s upper teeth.

He confirmed sperm whales have no upper teeth.

Then he removed two teeth from the lower jaw for tests to show this whale’s age. Each one took him nearly 10 minutes of delving and sawing with a long knife.
Cautious

Dr Jepson was also cautious about a theory propounded on the media that a recent spate of east coast strandings – four in a fortnight – was due to the whales’ sonar navigation systems being confused by seismic surveys and other sonic activities.

Dr Jepson said it was a possibility which was being investigated but there was no clear evidence for it yet.

Strandings were particularly frequent in the early 19th century, then declined with the decline of whale populations due to hunting.

An increase in sightings might be a good sign – that populations are recovering following the 1986 ban on hunting, he said.

Blubber samples from other strandings show sperm whales are less exposed to pollutants while in their natural habitat – way off the north west of Scotland – using their carnivorous teeth to munch squid.

Why some stray into the North Sea is not clear, but in the alien relatively shallow water they struggle to find directions or food. The strand because they are staving and exhausted, Dr Jepson said before leaving Mr Fowler and cleansing manager Martin Sollis with the daunting task of removing the huge carcase.

Mr Fowler recalled that when a minke whale was stranded at Gibraltar Point last year, the Natural History Museum took its skeleton back to London, while its flesh went to renders. “But that whale was only three tons”, he said.

Mr Sollis, tackling his first whale since joining the ELDC, said that the renders, Hughes’ of Skellingthorpe, would have taken the sperm whale if they had not already been dealing with one found on the Humber on February 4th.

On Friday a 64-ton caterpillar tractor slowly dragged the whale along the beach to Winthorpe, building sand ramps to go over the groynes.

A pit was dug in which the carcase was sawed into sections by a Skegness slaughterhouse team.

The pieces were loaded into articulate lorries and taken to a deep waste site at Slippery Gowt Lane in Boston.

East Lindsey council will recover the costs of the removal operation from a national agency, the office of the Receiver of Wrecks, whose brief included whales as well as boats.

Unquote

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