The Whale... If you read a recent front page story of the San Francisco Chronicle, you would have read about a female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines. She was weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped around her body, her tail, her torso and a line tugging in her mouth.
A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farallon Islands (outside the Golden Gate ) and radioed an environmental group for help. Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so bad off, the only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her. They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually freed her.
When she was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous circles. She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time, and nudged them, pushed them gently around as she was thanking them.
Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives. The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth said her eyes were following him the whole time, and he will never be the same.
and Snopes says "it is TRUE"
3 comments:
There's a radio version of this story (FYI, it happened 5 years ago, so it's not that "recent"), that I heard on NPR a couple of years ago (I forget the show, but perhaps you could Google it?). They speak w/ one of the rescuers (I think "The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth")
Here ya are: ENJOY!
RadioLab: Animal Blessings
And appropriately enough for us Piskies, they begin in Big John (aka "The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine"), in NYC, for the Blessing of the Animals!
[The whale story starts at about 4:40 in---]
Our friends on the other side apparently have nothing new to complain about so dredging material out of the past has to do. There's a huge amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth over at T1:9 about an Illinois priest who justified Mary Glasspool's consecration on the ground of "This is who we are!"
When you look at it closely, however, the comment is from a parish newsletter from last May, even before Mary was consecrated.
Good grief! It must be terribly disappointing to them that Mary hasn't raped and pillaged her way through the Anglican Communion since her consecration so you have to dig up old parish newsletters to whine and moan about!
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