Rescuers have hauled a young humpback whale that had become stuck on a sandbar into deeper water, but while the animal is swimming freely, it is yet to find its way back to the ocean.
In the first stranding of the annual humpback migration, the sub-adult whale entered the Coolongolook River near Forster late Sunday and beached on a sandbar in shallow water on Monday afternoon.
Four boats with teams from NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), the Organisation for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans in Australia (ORRCA), Sea World Foundation, and Marine Rescue Forster-Tuncurry successfully refloated the animal on Tuesday.
The whale season officially starts in May, but the first sightings of humpbacks swimming northward past Sydney began in March in an early start to the season. Humpback whales typically spend summer in Antarctica where there is plenty of their favourite food – Antarctic krill – and then return to warm waters for winter and breeding.
Sea World Foundation’s head of marine sciences, Wayne Phillips, said the whale, which was on the sandbar for about 24 hours before rescuers arrived, had suffered sunburn.
“Our first port of call was to try and make the whale as comfortable as possible, so we started to wet the animal down and just to see also if it would help itself getting off that sandbar with a little bit of human intervention,” Phillips said.
“Unfortunately, our efforts to try and get him or encourage him to move off the sandbar were futile, so we decided then that we’d have to tow the animal off that bar.
“We placed a couple of large slings around those massive pectoral fins and then used our boat to pretty much drag the animal off the bar.”
Phillips said it took two attempts before the whale was swimming freely and the animal gained strength once in deeper water.
It is not unusual for whales to swim into harbours, lakes and rivers. An April stranding was early, Phillips said, but probably just misadventure.
A NPWS spokesperson said the approximately 9.5-metre, 12-tonne whale appeared to have no visible injuries or signs of entanglement.
ORRCA spokesperson Pip Jacobs said the whale was still in Wallis Lake at 4pm on Wednesday. NPWS and ORRCA staff had stood down for the day, but would search for the whale on Thursday to see if it was still there or had found its way out.
Rescuers were hoping that higher tides would help it navigate to sea, but would consider alternatives if it was unable to do so alone. Phillips said the whale was unlikely to restrand now that it understood the risks in the area.
The NPWS spokesperson said it was monitoring the situation with other government agencies, ORRCA and Sea World.
All vessels, as well as stand-up paddleboards, surfboard riders and drones, must remain 100 metres from the whale, and jet-skis should stay 300 metres away, the NPWS spokesperson said.
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Caitlin Fitzsimmons is the environment and climate reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald. She was previously the social affairs reporter and the Money editor.Connect via email.