Cape Town - Fish Hoek residents were alarmed to witness what one called whale harassment on Tuesday, as a motorised boat appeared to rev its engine and aggressively circle a cow and calf in the bay.
But it wasn’t harassment after all, as the Shark Spotters clarified: it was a highly trained team chasing away the whales so that they didn’t become entangled in the shark net.
From land it might have looked like a boat terrorising the sea mammals by circling them, but the skipper was actually circling between the shark net and the whales, herding them away from danger.
A Fish Hoek resident, who did not want to be named, saw the events unfolding from his home overlooking the bay.
He said the small boat that usually sets up the shark net in the morning and takes it down at night had relaunched to get close to the whales.
“I saw these guys at midday doing tight circles around and around. It went on for half an hour. They were harassing that whale.”
The man said he was annoyed the skipper and crew were not only putting the whales in distress, but using taxpayers’ money to do it.
“The whale went underwater for a while, and when it came up, they were waiting.
“They went straight towards it and starting doing their circles again. It started just outside the breakers on the beach, and ended up past Sunnydale.”
But Sarah Titley, project manager for the Shark Spotters, said her staff did no harm to the whales, and were in fact trying to save them.
“They were not harassing the whales. The were trying to pro-actively ensure that nothing gets entangled in the shark exclusion barrier.”
Titley said the team had been trained by the South African Whale Disentanglement Network as well as the Department of Environmental Affairs, and were always on standby when the shark nets were in the water.
“It’s part of our conditions that every time we deploy the shark exclusion barrier, we have the whale disentangled team on standby.
“If a whale enters the bay, they launch the boat.”
Titley explained that they took preventative measures, because chasing whales away was much easier than disentangling them and running the risk of them drowning or being injured.
The motorboats circled aggressively because the frequency of the boat’s engine is what made the whales move off, and it needed to be revved to reach the correct pitch.
Cape Argus