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Boaters usually don’t have to worry about things going south if they cross paths with a whale, but there’s not much you can do if you manage to attract the attention of one of those massive creatures—a lesson that a woman who ended up being tossed into the water off the coast of New Jersey learned the hard way.
There are some notable exceptions, but for the most part, whales can be described as gentle giants that usually remain pretty unbothered when they encounter boats that make their way into their territory.
As a result, people aboard them don’t really need to be on high alert if they find themselves in the vicinity of one; they might approach the vessel out of curiousity, but it’s pretty rare for them to purposefully attack them unless you’re in the area near the Iberian Pennisula that’s home to some seemingly vindictive orcas.
With that said, there have been some incidents where a whale inadvertently managed to do some harm at the expense of an unsuspecting snorkeler and a kayaker who was briefly swallowed after ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time—a phrase that also applies to what transpired in New Jersey’s Barnegat Bay over the weekend.
A distressed whale knocked a woman off a boat off the coast of New Jersey before dying
It’s not rare to see whales in the waters off of New Jersey, and a number of boaters who made their way to the Barnegat Bay in the vicinity of Long Beach Island on Saturday ended up at the center of a fairly harrowing encounter.
According to ABC News, a 20-foot-long minke whale (a baleen species) was spotted flailing around in uncharacteristically shallow waters shortly after 3:30 PM, and one person who witnessed what transpired had their phone fixated on a boat that was rammed by the animal and tipped over to the point where a woman sitting on the gunwale fell into the water.
The woman in question was thankfully unharmed, but unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the whale. According to the Marine Mammal Stranding Center, the distressed animal ended up stranded on a sandbar shortly after the collision transpired, and officials dispatched to its location determined it had died once they were able to get close enough to examine it.
The carcass remained there over the weekend due to logistical issues, but the plan is to tow the whale back to shore on Monday in order to perform a necropsy.
The NOAA has spent close to a decade monitoring a rise in the number of whale strandings being reported along the East Coast (the bulk of the focus has been on humpbacks), and while many people have attempted to place the blame on the construction of wind farms, there’s currently no firm evidence that suggests they have impacted the behavior of the animals.
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