• baby sperm whale after disentanglement

  • 2023 Sea Lion Rescue Team Puerto Peñasco

Female Sperm Whale & Calf Rescue

Female Sperm Whale & Calf Rescue

 

 

Here is aLink to the original Post from the 15th of June, just a few short days after we sucessfully rescued the whales and turtles form the gill net. Here is a link to our video blog about the small town we live in @ SanCarlos.tv

All in all there were around 15 people directly or indirectly involved in making this happen. The funny thing is if any one event would have changed just a bit this whole thing might not have happened and thus a truly inspiring story would never had been told.

Now that the video is edited I can take a step back and think about what really happened that day and write about it with a little less emotion. I think the incident itself is almost a metaphor for the conflict that we see going on in the Sea of Cortes at this moment in 2012. You have several sectors competing to use the same dwindling resource. That resource of course is the fish that swim in the Gulf. You have commercial fisherman on one side and sport fisherman on the other. There really should be no conflict. Mexico has strong laws regarding sport fishing and commercial fishing. It is clearly defined in Mexican law which species are reserved for Sport fisherman, there are only six, and which species are for commercial exploitation. Over 60 if I can still count. So why the conflict? It is unfortunate that the Head of the Department of Conapesca, that is the Mexican Fisheries department for all the newbies reading this, his name is Ramon Coral, has decided that the species of fish that are reserved for sport fishing only are an under exploited resource and there for has unilaterally decided to allow illegal gill net fisheries and illegal long lines to commercially fish species that have by Mexican law been protected from the commercial fishing sectors. It is highly likely that the net that entangled those sperm whales and turtles was being used to Fish Dorado, often referred to as Mahi Mahi or Dolphin fish. The department of fisheries in Mexico have let fisherman break the law now for so long it is becoming very hard to turn the clock back. This has been the strategy of the commercial fishing sector for years of course. None of this happened by accident. Many people have mistakenly thought that the reason that there is little or no enforcement of fishing regulations in the Sea of Cortez is becuase of a lack of funding. I can tell you that after 10 years of seeing what has been going on and speaking with many funding has little to do with why we have no inspeccion and vigilancia in Sonora. Incompetence, corruption and negligence are the culprits.

 

  

Here is Rich Hillikers and Brian Repolges full unedited interviews about their experiences. Below Brian tells the heart breaking story of how he tried to save a whale in the same cituation 8 years ago and above Rick explains how lucky they were to find the whale. If it had not been for their great Karma they would have most likely not come across the whale and we would have had to go out the next day and look again.

 

 

 

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