Taking a Whale Out to Sea

A story from Monte Ash.

Humpback whale being towed out to sea

When a dead whale washes up on shore near a campground, the city decides it has got to go. But removing a 40-ton carcass isn’t all that easy. Monte, owner of TowBoat USA, learns the ropes and shows us just how it’s done. When the plan changed mid-day, Monte and crew found themselves dodging container ships and traveling with whale in tow through the dark, far offshore. This is another story that will have you on the edge of your seat.

CAPTAIN MONTE ASH is owner and president of TowBoat USA, based in Santa Cruz, California. He’s also the primary captain for the company, which operates in a fashion similar to a tow truck for dues paying members.

Monte was born in Kansas City, Kansas, and grew up in both Wyoming and Kansas until he joined the Navy at age 19. His passion for water developed on the inland ponds, lakes and streams where he spent his youth fishing. In the Navy, he spent six years operating a nuclear power plant on a submarine stationed in Pearl Harbor. In Hawaii, he enjoyed being around the ocean.

After leaving the Navy, he moved around quite a bit with his family while working for a power company.  That stint included stays in Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia, Alabama, and Jamaica, until they finally settled in Las Vegas. His last position with that company landed him in Pittsburg, California. On retiring from that job, he took a year off, got his captain’s license and affirmed that he wanted to be a professional boat captain. He purchased the 20-year old Vessel Assist Company, which was for sale at that time, and 2 years ago, he and his wife moved into the Santa Cruz Yacht Harbor, where they live aboard their spacious yacht docked next door to their two towboats.

 You can watch Monte’s story on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/KfJyL51Q2w4

TAKING A WHALE OUT TO SEA

Ok, let’s talk about whales. So we’d been doing this job, towing boats, helping people out, for about a year, and I got a phone call from Justin Viezbicke one day. Didn’t know who he was, didn’t have a clue, and he says, “I talked to your counter-part in Santa Barbara and he says that you’re the new guy up in Santa Cruz, and there’s a whale up in Half Moon Bay that’s washed ashore, and the City of Half Moon Bay wants it removed.  Your counterpart down here does a good job, and he says you’d do a good job, too.  So we want you to go get it.” And I said, “Wow! OK.”

So I called my counterpart in Santa Barbara and said, “What have you done to me?” (Laughter) He said, “No, no, no, no problem. It’s easy.” He explained to us what to do, how to do it, what not to do, and things to be careful about. And so I got to know Justin pretty quickly over a period of two days. I got to know everybody in Half Moon Bay over a period of about twelve hours.

We got under way one morning with me and a deckhand, and my wife, who’s the co-owner of the business. She drove up there with a swimmer, and we went from not knowing anything about towing whales off the beach to towing a whale off the beach in about eighteen hours. But with a lot of help from our friend down in Santa Barbara.

So this first one we towed, probably close to a year and a half ago now, it was a whale, a small humpback whale I believe, that was washed up right behind the campground in Half Moon Bay. That’s why they wanted it removed, because it was gonna cause a health hazard. It was sitting on the beach. It stunk. There were a lot of people that didn’t want it there. It was kind of the height of camping season, and they wanted it removed. They’ve had other whales that washed up in Half Moon Bay that nobody cared about cause it’s just on a beach so you let nature take its course, but they wanted this one gone.

So the way it works, is that Justin calls you and says, “There’s a whale out there. I’m gonna coordinate with the entities that want it removed, and we’ll get you out there as soon as we can because people want it done right now.” Right.

And so we have to kind of plan our course, because we don’t want to get there at a low tide. We don’t want to get there in bad weather. It’s not delivering the mail, so it’s something we wanna kind of plan and get ourselves a good chance for success.

So this first one we went on, we did a little bit of planning over that period of eighteen hours, and we kinda knew what we were doing when we got there. We put a beach crew on the beach and our boat out there a little ways off. Had a guy swim out from the beach and get the tow line. We have a thousand feet of tow line on the boat. We didn’t have to put that much out, but he had to swim out and get it outside the surf line and towed it back in. He had the tow strap ready to go on the whale.

And when I was out there on the boat waiting for him to swim back in, I noticed that there were a lot of people. There was just a crowd of people, and they were all kind of starting to gather around my wife cause she was the only one that had the red TowBoat US t-shirt, and she wasn’t having it. She didn’t want to have anything to do with it. She was concentrating on making sure to get that whale off the beach. There was a city manager and the assistant city manager, and there were police, and there was dogs and kids. Because the campground is right there!

It was a big deal. There’s a boat offshore, and there’s this guy swimming a line in. That was probably the biggest event of the day, was getting the line onto the whale, getting it strapped up. And we decided it’s the top of the tide, there’s enough water under the whale to pull it off. I was kind of thinking we’d have to pull pretty hard, but as soon as we started pulling, the whale comes right off, and we start towing it out.

We get, I don’t know, probably a half mile, or a mile off the beach in Half Moon Bay, and we call Justin, and say, “Justin, we got the whale. It’s off the beach.” He’d told us where he wanted it. He actually told us to take it to the west, most-western Farallon Island – I’m sure it has a name – that island. And he wanted us to go around the island and get upwind of the island and drop the whale off so it would wash up on the beach. So it would be in a place that nobody would care about, and that it wouldn’t wash back onshore. That’s the one thing they did not want to have happen. When whales get removed, it takes a lot of time for us to do this, and once I touch the whale, and Justin has something to do with the whale, we kind of own the whale. To a certain extent we are responsible for it’s proper disposal.

He said, “Go out there, drop it off on this island, let me know when you’re done.” We had about a 30-mile tow to get there. I didn’t really know how long it was gonna take when we first started. I knew that we couldn’t tow it like a boat. Boats are shaped like this, and go easy through the water. Whales aren’t, especially when towed backwards, cause that’s where we attach – to the tale. We figured out we could go about three knots. (Laughter) So do the math.

Ten hours -by the time we leave Half Moon Bay, the time to get to this place in the Farallons, this magical island out there. We had food with us, we had drinks. We knew that we were gonna be gone for awhile, but not how long. So we said, all right, set a course for this island. It was the morning, we knew we’d get there at night, so we started kinda planning on what we were gonna do. How to get the whale close to the island, not too close that we’d didn’t get wrecked on the island in the middle of the night.

And we get to the point where we’re just gonna, I know we’re gonna lose phone reception, cause we’re maybe six or seven or eight miles out, and I start getting texts from Justin, “Call me! Call me! Call me!” So I called him. He said, “That plan’s not gonna work. Fish and Game doesn’t want the whale on the beach. They say that we’d have to get all kinds of permits, and they’re not gonna allow it because they don’t have time to think about it enough. So we can’t put it there.”

“OK. Where do we put it?” (More laughter.) He said, “I picked another point for you. It’s gonna be far enough out and in a different current loop that the whale probably won’t come back on shore. I said, “OK, where’s that?” He says, “Fifteen miles west of that island.” (Silence) Fifteen miles, that’s another five hours. (Laughter) OK. (Laughter) Right? Ok.

So there’s nothing we could do. There’s this whale behind us, about four hundred feet on a tow line, and we promised we were gonna put it on this island. And now we’ve got to promise we’re gonna put it (motions) way out there. We get out a chart, my GPS chart, and try to look at where to put it. We’re gonna be five miles past the continental shelf, in a 28 foot boat, in the middle of the night, with a whale, a dead whale attached to us.

So we just kind of settled in. Decided we’d take shifts. Me and another guy on the boat decided we’d take shifts driving, so we could sleep. For the biggest part of the journey going out though it was daylight. So as we were going out lots of things happened.

The first thing that we were concerned about is that the course we had to take to go straight to where we wanted to be crossed all the shipping lanes that were going into San Francisco. So we’ve got a shipping lane that goes this way. Then we’ve got one that goes out. We’ve got two or three things. As we approached what we could see, it wasn’t quite dark yet, but there was a lot of ships. And ships in the shipping lane go ten to twenty knots. And we were poking along at three, with five hundred feet of line and a dead whale on the back.

So we kinda had to pick our way through the shipping lanes and make sure we weren’t gonna get in the way of any big ships. We had to plan to give em a call and let em know that we were there if we got close to them. Fortunately, it was kind of one of these things - as a ship went by, we went here, then another went this way just as we were getting ready to go in that shipping lane. One went by and we went through and another one came by, and we were able to kind of weave our way through about four or five ships as we’re going through. Good to get through there without getting hit.

As we got closer to the Farallons, we could start to see the islands, when it was still daylight. We could see the shapes of the islands. And as we got out there, the water started changing. It went from kind of, you know how it is, kind of go brown, then green, then blue. Just as we got to the really, really blue water, where everything turned into what looked like tropical water, there was just this multitude of life that came up.

We had a pod of dolphins that came by and purposely checked us out. They weren’t quite sure what we were doing out there, but we were something that they weren’t expecting, weren’t used to seeing. So a pod of dolphins came by and they actually went under the boat. We think we saw some turn around and take another pass, and there were quite a few that kinda hung back and actually swam under the whale. I’m sure they were checking out why this whale was swimming backwards on the surface. And we could see all that happening around it.

So once the dolphins kinda left us, the porpoise left us. They were maybe there for ten minutes kind of milling around, but we just kept on going straight and steady. We saw a pod of whales. I don’t know that they knew what we were doing or were curious about it, but they were very close to it. We could see they were feeding. Coming up, going down. Coming up, going down, but right out the back of the boat so close that I could take video and pictures of the whale we were towing and the whales behind us in the same frame.

So we were just parading whales for a little while. And I think probably the best thing, the funniest, most amusing to me anyway, was that there was about thirty sea lions showed up on scene and sea lions are very curious, and these sea lions were freaking out.  Cause they saw us, and sea lions that are habituated to humans and boats, they probably thought, “Hey, a fishing boat”. They all came up to the boat and were popping their heads up and kinda trying to get a look over the side to see if we were fishing, or cutting bait, or throwing anything over the side they could eat.

And once they figured out that we probably weren’t gonna feed them, then they noticed the whale. (Laughter) And it was like a pack of dogs had seen something that they were noticing. They all stopped and they all stood up as high as they could stand up, like this with their noses in the air, and they all stayed real stationary in a little area about fifty feet wide, and they all just watched like a parade, just real stiff. As this whale floats by them. {Laughter)

You could just see them, just completely shocked, these poor sea lions. And the whale went by and you could see them, kinda you know, look around to see if there was anything else weird. And a couple of them followed the whale for awhile, and the rest of them just kinda slowly wandered off.

We had those three encounters maybe in an hour or two of each other, right out there just past the shipping lane. That was pretty cool! The rest of the time we didn’t see anything. We saw the islands. We saw a lot of ships. And as it got dark, then it got kind of weird, because then we knew we were out there all by ourselves. There’s no other ships, no traffic, no animals, and no other boats at all, and we’re still moving, moving, moving. We think we’ve probably got five or six hours to go to get to our destination.

We finally got there. It was a very lonely place out there for us. We recorded where to put the whale. We got the whale loose from the towboat, which was a little bit ominous. As we were going out the current was a north current when we first started, and when we got out there, it was going west. We were trying to find the end of our tow line, so we could unhook it from the line we were gonna leave on the whale so we didn’t have to handle the whale, or to be able to identify the whale as something that’s been towed previously.

At that moment, the whale caught up with us. Just out of the dark. And we could see the shadow coming towards us. And we knew it was the whale, but it was coming at us, and we couldn’t get away because we had lines struggling, and as the whale came up it just kinda nudged the boat. But we got all our line back. Got the line we were gonna cut off the whale cut off. Took a few quick pictures to prove that we were there, and that we did what we had to do, and we turned around and came back to Santa Cruz.

We were gone 22 hours – from the time we left Santa Cruz, all the way out and then back. That’s the longest one we’ve had. That was a long, long ride. We covered 45 miles to get that whale to a point that it would not come back to shore.

Thank you for sharing your story with us Monte!