Sick gray whale 'Waylon' visits San Diego Harbour to recover
by The Log/Nancy Knudsen on 8 May 2010
Whale tail in San Diego Harbour SW
Sailors may have sighted the gray whale first in San Diego Harbour, but soon there were other boaters, tour boats and media helicopters, as a sickly whale took residency in the Harbour for a week during its migration, apparently to recover. After a week of eating on the Harbour seabed and then surfacing for eager locals, the whale left to continue its migration.
The California gray whale made frequent appearances after first surfacing near Shelter Island April 19, and there's nothing like a visiting whale to entrance the human population.
After practically starring in its own San Diego “reality show” for about a week, the whale, nicknamed Waylon, disappeared for a few days -- but on April 30, he was sighted briefly by passengers aboard a San Diego Sea and Land Tours’ (SEAL) amphibious vehicle.
“We saw him out near Ballast Point, and that was the last time we saw him,” Mark Keeler, head of amphibious tours for SEAL told http://www.thelog.com/home/logmain.aspx!The_Log. “He had disappeared for a few days, and everyone thought he was gone; then we came upon him as he was getting ready to leave.”
Keeler described the leviathan has healthy looking and active. When the gray whale first entered the bay, the whale was described as lethargic and sickly looking.
“He looks healthy now -- and what’s really nice is that he found stuff in the harbor he was willing to eat,” Keeler said. “That’s what was keeping him in here. You can see he’d be going down to the bottom, because the mud would rise up around him.”
Gray whales feed on small crustaceans, such as amphipods and tube worms found in bottom sediment, according to the American Cetacean Society. Adult whales measure 45 to 50 feet, on average, and weigh 30 to 40 tons.
The gray whale makes one of the longest of all mammalian migrations, averaging 10,000 to 14,000 miles round trip. Gray whales typically feed in the Bering Sea in the summer and migrate south to calving grounds in Mexico for the winter. Between February and May, they make the reverse migration north.
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