Dapoli villagers told to keep an eye out as whale may wash up again

Programme associates of the GIZ project along with a local NGO called Sahyadri Nisarg Mitra and forest guards were involved in the rescue.

Read | Maharashtra: 40-foot-long blue whale rescued off Dapoli coast 

On February 1, a volunteer assigned with tracking the nesting of turtles on the beach, had spotted the whale struggling in shallow water on the coast. He alerted the forest department and the programme officers of the GIZ project. The whale was stuck in sand and the group first made an effort to keep it moist. The team also summoned a veterinary doctor to the site who examined the whale and diagnosed that it might have been suffering from a stomach infection.

“The whale had no injuries but it may have been in pain since it was stuck in shallow water and could not even attempt to swim back. It was given antibiotics and injections before we began making attempts to rescue it,”said Abhinay Kelaskar, the programme officer of the GIZ project in Ratnagiri who was present during the rescue.

Along with help from locals in Dapoli, the first attempt was to push the whale into the sea which proved unsuccessful. “We then called for two trawler boats and ropes were tugged gently on the whale’s sides. With the help of the boats, the whale was taken into the sea and released,” Kelaskar said.

Last year, the first live beaching case of a blue whale had occurred in Alibaug. Despite the rescue effort, that whale could not be saved. Last week, a 37-feet dead bryde’s whale had washed ashore which was buried without an autopsy. Having learnt lessons from these, the mangrove cell had come up with a protocol on specific roles of various departments in a situation like this. N Vasudevan, chief conservator of forests of the mangrove cell said that this was the first successful rescue operation of a whale in the state.