BARNEGAT LIGHT – The collision between a whale and a boat killed the animal and tossed one boater overboard.
The Marine Mammal Stranding Center of Brigantine said that at around 2:45 p.m. on August 2, they received a call from the NJ State Police Marine Unit that a whale was in the Barnegat Bay near the inlet. The Coast Guard and Sea Tow responded to the scene.
About an hour later, a boater reported that a vessel had struck the whale. Video posted online showed the whale flailing about while the boat almost capsized. People were close enough to shout “shut your motor off” as someone fell off the side of the boat near the back. The whale swam off as best it could after this, tail slapping the water hard.
Staff from the stranding center boarded a boat driven by a NJ Fish and Wildlife Conservation officer. They tried to inspect the whale’s body, which had come to rest on a sandbar in very shallow water outside of the channel. It was identified as a minke whale, approximately 20 feet in length.
They were able to get within 30 yards of the whale, but it wasn’t safer to get any closer because of the tidal conditions, they said.
The whale was to be towed to a nearby state park for a necropsy on the morning of August 4. No human injuries were reported.
Sheila Dean, director of the Stranding Center, watched video of the incident and told NJ Advance Media “It looks like the whale was in shallow water and of course people in their boats surrounded it and someone got very close. I don’t know how they even got where the whale was because it was so shallow.”
“If the whale approaches you, you shut your engines off and just lay dead in the water until the whale swims away,” she said. “You should never approach a whale. You have to stay 150 feet away from marine mammals in the wild. That’s the law.”
