At Long Last, Humphrey Leaves Bay for Open Sea

Humphrey the humpback whale swam out the Golden Gate to freedom Wednesday, once again ending a successful rescue effort to save the world’s most celebrated cetacean.

For the second time in five years, a flotilla of boats escorted the 40-foot marine mammal out of San Francisco Bay and into the Pacific as hundreds of people lined the shore to watch.

“I feel wonderfully exhausted,” said Patrick Brady, a rescue volunteer who, at one point, stayed up through the night to aid the trapped whale. “It was well worth it.”

Humphrey, who had been towed from the muddy bay bottom Tuesday by a U.S. Coast Guard boat, was discovered Wednesday morning still swimming in the bay south of the Bay Bridge.

Volunteers from the California Marine Mammal Center and members of the Coast Guard resumed their rescue efforts, banging on metal pipes dangling in the water. The noisy action drove the whale out of the bay at precisely 5 p.m.

The three-day rescue was just a brief reminder of Humphrey’s 26-day sojourn into San Francisco Bay and up the Sacramento River five years ago this month. Frequently seen in the waters off Northern California since, he swam back into the bay on Sunday. Whale experts had no explanation for his unusual behavior, except to say that he is an unusual whale.

“I don’t think we’ll ever figure out why he came back,” said Marc Webber, a marine biologist with the Marine Mammal Center who helped coordinate the rescue. “Maybe he’s got a screw--or a flipper--loose.”

Nevertheless, Webber said Humphrey had tremendous value to his endangered species as an envoy who touched the hearts of humans.

“What he’s done in his life has really galvanized a lot of interest in whales and drawn people closer to whales,” Webber said.

The rescue provided whale scientists with some of their closest contact ever with a live humpback--including at one point standing on his flippers while he was beached near Candlestick Park for 24 hours Monday and Tuesday.

“He was very gentle with us,” said Jan Roletto, curator of the Marine Mammal Center. “He could easily have crushed us.”

Although rescuers coaxed Humprhey to within several miles of the Golden Gate before dark Tuesday, he swam back south of the Bay Bridge during the night and was discovered there Wednesday morning.

The 40-ton whale spent much of the day swimming back and forth in the channel between San Francisco and Yerba Buena Island--in sight of the city’s financial district.

For more than three hours, he resisted the efforts of rescuers to herd him under the bridge. The team members pounded on their metal pipes with hammers--the same technique used by Japanese fishermen to catch dolphins and by rescuers five years ago to herd Humphrey out of the Sacramento River.

This time however, Humphrey repeatedly dived under water only to come up for air behind the line of boats.

Finally, at about 3 p.m., he swam slowly under the Bay Bridge, meandered past San Francisco, spouted once under the Golden Gate Bridge and headed out to sea. Half-a-dozen Coast Guard and private vessels followed him more than a mile, just before sunset, to make sure he did not come back.

Humphrey has shown remarkable resilience. Whale experts said he appeared to be healthy, despite spending 24 hours stranded in mud.

“He seems to be swimming and diving pretty well,” Webber said. “That’s a good sign. So far, he doesn’t seem to be showing any sign of ill-effects.”

For the most part, the rescue of Humphrey has been a low-budget effort made up primarily of volunteers from the Marine Mammal Center. Coast Guard Lt. Jim Cash said the only additional cost for his operations was the fuel for the boats, which so far had amounted to $170.

However, a $17,000 underwater transmitter that was used in an attempt to lure Humphrey with whale sounds, was ruined after it was stuck in the mud Tuesday.