Cape Town - A fin, a long dark shape in the water, and you are on a stand-up paddle board about a kilometre offshore. Enough to get anyone’s adrenalin pumping.
This is the sight that some paddle boarders have seen over the last few days off Sunny Cove and Fish Hoek, and photographs have done the rounds on Facebook and e-mails in an attempt to identify it.
It turns outs the 3.5m creature was not a great white shark, as some paddle boarders feared, but something far more rarely seen: a pygmy right whale.
It is the smallest and least known of all the baleen whales and, according to Mark Carwardine’s book Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises, it is seldom seen at sea and confirmed sightings are “very rare”.
One local paddle boarder, Gary van Rooyen, said on Monday he had got a snap of the whale from his house on the mountainside above Sunny Cove on Sunday.
“It looked like a great white. It’s mouth was open and it was eating fish. I’ve seen every bit of wildlife barring a shark, so I thought this was a breakthrough. It was moving quite fast from Simon’s Town direction to Kalk Bay.”
Van Rooyen put the photographs on Facebook.
“Quite a lot of people were talking about it, quite nervously.”
Then Alison Kock, research manager for Shark Spotters, told him the shark spotters had already alerted her to the animal and it had been identified as a pygmy right whale.
Kock said the spotters had seen it near Fish Hoek around 6.30pm last Tuesday.
“It looked very shark-like, but was still there the next day, which is unusual behaviour for a shark, so we launched the research boat and when we got to it, we saw a whale we had not seen before. Mike Meyer (from the Department of Environment Affairs) identified it and said it was rare to see them,” Kock said.
The pygmy whale (Caperea marginata) has been hanging around off the False Bay coast for several days now.
Whale scientist Meredith Thornton confirmed it was very rare to see the pygmy whales.
“As kids we used to see them sometimes at Glencairn, but I have not heard reports of sightings for a very long time. We really don’t know much about them,” Thornton said.
Carwardine writes that the pygmy whale has a small, indistinct blow, typically spends no more than a few seconds at the surface, and does not breach or lobtail. The flukes are never lifted clear of the water and it swims slowly in an undulating style.
“A flash of white may be seen – the lower jaw or baleen gum – as the snout breaks the surface.”
Cape Times