It's been 18 days since the mother humpback and her calf were discovered heading up the Sacramento River the wrong way. Under the terms of the Endangered Species Act, state officials are given the power and the finances to pay for rescue efforts when an animal on the list is in trouble. The mother and calf were. They were stuck in the Port of Sacramento 90 miles upstream in fresh water! They had wounds and the mother, they believed, might still be nursing her calf. Without salt water the mother couldn't feed. It could turn into a serious situation. They believed these two had wondered off their migration course from Mexico. Usually Humpbacks give birth in the warm waters between Hawaii and Mexico curing the winter and then head up to Alaska for feeding time over the summer with their young in tow.

So rescue workers from California Fish and Game along with several agencies decided to try and lure the whales back down stream and into the open ocean to get them back on their migration course. First they started with those weird underwater whale noises. These were whale feeding noises. After a few days of that not working, they figured out that they were maybe playing sounds of the wrong kind of whales feeding and that's why the mother and calf didn't recognize the sounds and follow them.

Okay; attempt number two would be herding. This was basically to band together a flotilla of boats and push them forward, not physically but just by giving them nowhere to go but in the direction the flotilla was going. This sort of worked but then the whales dove back under the flotilla when they got too close to the next bridge they needed to go under.

Basically at each bridge along the river they seemed to hesitate, which makes you wonder how they past them going up. But that's another story, I guess. So, when the flotilla didn't work, the rescuers decided to employ a flotilla with noise. If the whales were bothered by the traffic noise at bridges (which they sort of guessed they were) then maybe making noise under water would move them back down river. All of this served to move them a little then the whales would stop where they wanted and swim in circles when they wanted. Scientists more than once saying "the whales will do what the whales want to do." Really?

Then on Sunday, they took off and swam about miles down river and toward the San Francisco Bay. By Monday things were looking good and by Tuesday they were in the bay speeding toward the Golden Gate Bridge and their freedom.

By this time, the giant gash on the back of the mother looked like it was getting better. The scientists had been able to give both animals a shot of antibiotics. They tried to put a tracking device on the mother to follow them out to the open sea.

By nightfall Tuesday the two had slowed and were circling off Tiburon, a coastal town just three miles away from the Golden Gate Bridge.

This morning we took a fishing boat out into the San Francisco Bay and like the rescue boats, we couldn't see anything. Just fog and a calm bay. The two humpbacks now known as Delta and Dawn (named by California’s Lt. Governor for the California Delta and the "dawn" of a new day) had vanished and it appeared this time, for good. Rescuers said if they didn't surface by the afternoon, they were pretty sure they had slipped out during the night.

The tracking device had failed and no one may ever really know why or when the two made their way back to open sea waters. But most everyone is glad that they did!! All along the route back toward the ocean, Delta and Dawn had a fan club following them. Not since Humphrey, the lost male humpback did this 22 years ago, did anyone see such a sight. Last time, it took a month to lure Humphrey back to the ocean. Delta made it in just 18 days and she was a lot farther inland.

Having been married 12 years this does not surprise me. I can imagine the underwater scene now:

Delta: anyone down here know how to get to the Golden Gate Bridge????

Humphrey: I know exactly where I'm going. I looked at the map before I left home.

Keywords: Whales

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.. RonJon Anastasia

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