Guess what I'm doing on Sunday!

Bet you can't even get close!

Sky Diving

Nope... hint... 'baleen'

Going Taassie Tiger hunting.

Tas, your hint gave it away, your going, baleening(ballooning)

Whale watching ?

All wrong... Val is warmest

Swimming with the fishes, snorkeling.

BIG fishies!!!

Give in???

I'm doing a course tomorrow with National Parks to become a whale rescue volunteer So in the unfortunate event that we get strandings here like we have been lately I can go and help rescue them and get them back out to sea Is going to be a very cool day

We only gave in because you have told us the answer, other wise that was our next guess. By the map that I looked at Kindred is not on the seashore. How do you practice , go and catch a whale and beach it then learn how to rescue and return it to sea

No... (funny enough ). It's going to be loads of fun because they have a life size blow-up whale to use in the surf

It did not come from one of those shops

he heh

Well... that was pretty full on It's a little more dangerous than I had bargined for. They started off by saying that a lady was bitten by a pilot whale and broke her arm in 30 places. Then they showed pictures of stranded whales with blood everywhere and the first thing I thought of was SHARKS. Then they mentioned that there is a problem with sharks!!! Then they said that you can get struck by a swinging tail or pinned under a rolling whale and they could drown you... and then they put me in the swimming group and I had to swim the whale out into the ocean into water I could not stand in because I'm a strongish swimmer with dive experience and one of the guys that attended the last whale rescue said that as he swam the whale out he was bumped all the way by sharks

So now I'm a volunteer whale rescuer and will still do it but think I'm going to be VERY careful.

may be, if you are more experienced, you can develop to a shark rescuer ?



regards Bemo

I'm more worried by the 40 tonne whales that we could encounter

Wow that sounds like a task for the very brave, nerves of steel types! Good luck with it Simon, you'll be doing a good job!

All the Best

Hmmm, I have been thinking about all of this. The whales beach themselves so we do our best to push them back into the water where they belong and are the happiest. That is nice because we are kind to animals.
But, in an earlier age when we were much more primitive we would have seen a heap of whales on the beach as food, heating oil, and lots of other things that we humans are capable of inventing.
Now, the Japanese like to catch whales and we kind to animals people do our best to stop them. But here are a heap of dead whales on the beach that we have been unsuccessful in returning to the water so we have to bring in bulldozers and excavators to bury them. Can't we sell them to the Japanese so they don't have the hard work of going fishing for them? That would save having to bury them and save a lot of whales that are already in the ocean.
I oughta go into politics

You got that from Kochie LOL. On one hand it makes sense... burying the whales can cost a huge amount and the bill for some rescues goes up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. I would not like to see us sell whale meat to anyone for a lot of reasons. First on the list for me is they should not be eating whales in the first place. Why should they when there are so many other things they could eat. Some of these whales do not become sexually mature until they are 20 or more years old so the populations cannot rebound for a very long time once they are depleated. They are dead... sure... but I would not like to be seen to support this practice in ANY way.. dead or not. Another less biassed reason might be that we do not fully understand why they are beaching. What if they are beaching because of human activities? Would that be ethical? We know from fossil remains that whales have been beaching themselves since there have been whales but we also know that in recordable history the number of whale strandings has increased and this can be correlated with the increased exploitation and exploration of the oceans. Who's to say that seismic exploration for mineral or petroleum deposits somewhere in Bass Strait did not precipitate a stranding? I would find that unethical to say hey we caused a bunch of whales to beach themselves and we saved what we could.. the others are dead anyway so anyone for sushi? (being deliberately emmotive here ). Another reason is that sometimes whales beach themselves because they are sick, old, or otherwise injured. The quality of the meat in such animals would almost certainly be inferior to that of individually healthy whales selected from a healthy pod. Another reason is that when the whales strand themselves they thrash around and cause considerable injuries to themselves often causing considerable wounds. This too would make the flesh inferior to properly processed meat. A big reason for me is that strandings have been occurring for as long as there have been whales and when they do die like this other animals know it and line up to eat the benefits. I would rather see the energy go back into the food chain than end up sold to the highest bidder and on someone's plate? I would rather see the dead whales taken out to sea and cast adrift to feed the ocean's animals. Then people jump up and down and say we are attacting sharks to the coast and endangering people's lives... The cynical side of me also worries that if there was a monetary value associated with beached whales that politicians might not be so keen to support future rescue efforts to save the ones that we can I guess I don't have a lot of faith in people to do the right thing... I mean I went along to this course and was shocked on so many levels... did you know that when sperm whales beach themselves (and these are one of the more common big species to do so) the rescuers must go along with a chainsaw and cut the lower jaw off all the dead ones because their teeth are made from ivory and there is an international embargo on the trade of ivory to stop people killing things like elephants and whales just for the ivory and if left in-situ people will hack the teeth out and sell the teeth on the underground ivory market This kind of corrupt behaviour is why I would not like to see a monetary value put on whale meat... because a lot of people would go to enormous lengths to exploit this.

Who is Kochie? I thought of it all by meself.
You are right, humanity is intrinsically greedy and selfish and can't be trusted to act from pure motives. The exceptions are a delight when they are seen.
Thanks for enlightening me on a lot of things Simon. I have often wondered if beachings are a modern phenomenon or not. Now I know.

The thing I struggle with a bit Dee is that because we know that strandings have always occurred that maybe this is just one of mother nature's ways of weeding out the stupid ones (because strandings have been attributed to 'whale error') and the weak ones and by pushing them out we will make them (the whales) like us humans I overcome this dilema by knowing that in almost all the things that drastically affect whale numbers, humans figure highly in almost all of them... so this is some way to make up for our indiscretions.

What else! I thought of whale rescueing but thought that would be too common an event to mention on the forum.

Mushroom.

onya Simon