A Scene Right Out of ‘Moby-Dick’

It’s the stuff of hackneyed adventure fiction. A creature rises out of the murky depths to attack hapless seafarers tottering about in their frail boats.

Haven’t we heard this somewhere? Not this time, you haven’t. Believe it or not--and some marine experts have a hard time believing it--a whale damaged a 22-foot fishing boat and killed the boat’s skipper in the waters off Central California this week.

The way it happened is almost as astonishing as what happened. The whale, variously described as a humpback or a gray, didn’t just bump into the boat. It landed on top of it while breaching in the waters off the popular fishing port of Morro Bay.

“In my almost 20 years in the Coast Guard, I have never heard of anything like this happening,” said Lt. Stephen LaLonde of the Coast Guard station in San Pedro.

The force of the accident knocked overboard the boat’s owner, Jerry Tibbs, 51, a popular restaurateur from Bakersfield. Tibbs was lost at sea seven miles offshore.

His body was recovered Monday after search vessels and rescue helicopters had scoured the sea for nearly 18 hours, according to Michael Saindon, who is in charge of the Coast Guard station in Morro Bay.

Hampering rescue efforts, Saindon said, were foggy weather and the fact that the three passengers on board did not know how to use the emergency equipment to alert the Coast Guard. “Time is everything” in an accident, he said.

The most famous fish story of all time, “Moby-Dick,” involves a whale’s battle with a sea captain, but marine experts say whales are not known for being aggressive with boats. “That kind of thing just doesn’t happen,” said Joe Cordaro, a wildlife biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service in Long Beach.

However, fisheries spokesman Jim Milbury said he heard earlier this summer that a baby whale had jumped on the transom of a boat off Hawaii and broken a girl’s ankle.

And in January, an Alaska whale hunter died in the Bering Strait when his boat was overturned by a harpooned gray whale.

Perhaps in the fog--visibility was only 50 feet in Morro Bay on Sunday--the whale didn’t know the boat was there. A breaching whale thrusts itself out of the water, sometimes exposing most of its body. The enormous creature falling back into the water--humpbacks and grays can weigh up to 40 tons--causes an explosive splash that makes for some of the world’s most impressive wildlife photography.

Nobody knows why whales breach. Cordaro said there are several theories: that they are trying to slough off barnacles and the whale lice that attach to them, that it’s some kind of signal to other whales nearby, or that they do it just for fun.

“They just may enjoy jumping out of the water,” Cordaro said.

It’s likely that the whale didn’t enjoy landing on the fiberglass roof of Tibbs’ boat, the BBQ, any more than those on board. Some wildlife authorities speculate that the animal probably was injured by its encounter. The damaged boat was towed back to shore by the Coast Guard.

Tibbs was well known in Bakersfield as the owner of Mr. Tibbs Ribs, a barbecue and Cajun restaurant that drew patrons from around the southern San Joaquin Valley, according to his daughter, Tracy, 23.

“Everyone knew him,” said Tracy Tibbs. “Flowers galore are piling up outside the restaurant.”

But if Tibbs was popular in Bakersfield for his food and his friendly smile, he may have been even more popular--and unusual--in Morro Bay, where he and his wife had a condominium. Tibbs was the rare black fisherman out in the deep water, his daughter said.

Rather than feel ill at ease, Tibbs was proud of it. “He liked starting a trend,” she said.

His popularity was seen in the reaction of the fishing community when word got out on Labor Day that he was missing at sea. “No one fished that day,” Tracy Tibbs said. “There must have been 50 surplus boats out there looking for my dad.”

According to his family, fishing was more than an avocation with Tibbs, a balding bear of a man. It was an obsession. The BBQ was his third boat.

“He had everything on that boat: a GPS [global positioning satellite device], a fish finder,” his daughter said. “He loved to go 40 to 60 miles out and then navigate his way back.”

He also was realistic, even sanguine, about the dangers. “The sea was his friend,” she said. But he had suspicions that it would get him in the end.

“I never knew anyone who was not afraid of death like him,” she said.

Neither did he court death. He observed safety procedures and knew how to deal with weather. The others aboard the boat were less well-schooled. The Coast Guard identified them as Charles and Alan Brim, and Richard Arrington. Tracy Tibbs said they were friends who just wanted to go fishing.

Efforts to reach them Wednesday were unsuccessful. A relative said they were “too traumatized” to discuss the accident.

When Tibbs was knocked out of the boat by the whale, the others struggled to get help. Coast Guard officials said the survivors managed to get the radio working, but their unfamiliarity with the boat’s equipment delayed the rescue as much as an hour.

Tracy Tibbs is not cursing her father’s rare bad luck to have been in a boat hit by a whale. She takes it as a sign that it was his time. It was just too weird, she said. A whale jumps into the boat and takes only him, a Jonah who did not come back.

Jerry Tibbs’ best friend died a year ago and his ashes were scattered at sea near Santa Catalina Island. Tibbs programmed the exact location into his GPS.

Later this month, the Tibbs family will scatter his ashes at the same spot.