Carcass was tied to bulkhead to prevent navigational hazard, LDWF says
Sister Lake is known for nice speckled trout and redfish, but nothing as big as what Capt. Travis Lovell photographed last month in Terrebonne Parish.
According to nola.com, the guide had just about wrapped up his day’s fishing on Dec. 28 when he heard about the possibility of a 23 ½-foot sperm whale carcass in the area.
“I had one client with me that day — a guy from Minnesota — and we were pretty much done,” Lovell told nola.com. ”Another guide that I network with passed by, and said, ‘Man, the craziest thing happened earlier: I could swear I saw a whale this morning.’ I said, ‘No way. On a scale from 1-10, how sure are you it was a whale?’ He said, ‘9.5.'”
So they headed that way and sure enough they found the dead whale tied up to a bulkhead, and later found out that officials with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries had actually secured the carcass to prevent it from becoming a navigational hazard.
Lovell said a department biologist told him the whale had beached itself along a barrier island a few weeks earlier, but it was dragged back to sea. However, the whale’s carcass was initially discovered Dec. 3 near Turtle Bayou.
“If you think about it, we could have been fishing at the Pickets and seen that thing when it was alive,” he said. “I would have freaked out.”
