Search for albino whale
The World Today
Tuesday, 19 August , 2003
Following is a transcript of a conversation with skipper David Snell, whose boat struck Migaloo back in mid-August.
HAMISH ROBERTSON: One injured whale has again sent east coast Australians into a frenzy. The whale, a rare specimen belonging to a species of the world's only albino whale group is apparently badly injured after being struck by a boat.
The pearly-white humpback, who's called "Migaloo", has been seen on just a handful of occasions, and reappeared only recently, on her way to breeding grounds on the Great Barrier Reef. But now a large-scale search has been launched for "Migaloo", and the skipper who hit him says it wasn't his fault.
Louise Willis reports:
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 LOUISE WILLIS: In the literary classic Moby Dick, Captain Ahab comes off second best in his encounter with the great white whale. And, in north Queensland, skipper David Snell is counting his blessings.
He's certain his boat hit the world's only all-white whale, Migaloo – the name given by an Aboriginal elder in Hervey Bay, which means White Fella.
DAVID SNELL: The whale just stowed the surface 23 feet in front of me, I just started to see the water change colour, and it just started to go white, glowing white, and it just kept surfacing, and surfaced just about the time that I hit, I rode over the top of it, it kept surfacing, lifted the vessel, and consequently ripped off one of my centreboards, and that was lodged in the back of the whale as it continued to go back down again.
LW: You couldn't take any evasive action?
DS: Not at the time that I had to, and doing that speed, we're talking about seconds before I was actually on that area.
LW: So it wasn't a deliberate action?
DS: No way.
LW: Now, you've got a lot of publicity and a bit of a media frenzy surrounding this event.
DS: Yep.
LW: How does it feel to be the man who, I guess, might have run over the white whale, the rare white whale?
DS: Um, well it hasn't, like, it's still been sinking in for the last few days, but it, I know the more I think about it, I think "why me", you know, it's a very rare thing to happen to anybody.
LW: Skipper David Snell.
Migaloo is so seldom seen there was once scientific debate about whether he really existed. That debate ended once and for last month when he made a spectacular entrance into waters off the Gold Coast, sparking enormous interest from whale-watchers and marine researchers.
Cruise operators were inundated with bookings. So the prospect of an injured Migaloo is alarming. But authorities are not yet convinced the whale was Migaloo, and have begun a full-scale search.
Paul Dicketts from the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service: "We've got flights up, chartered flights with people heading down to look for the whale. The public have been made aware of the incident, so people such as dive operators, and there's many other people and boaties out on the water that will be aware of it, and they can also report it if they happen to come across the whale as well."
And we also get other government agencies, such as Coast Watch, who fly up and down our coast, they've been made aware of the whale, so they'll be keeping an eye out for us as well.
LW: But no luck yet?
PAUL DICKETTS: No luck yet.
LW: So you're searching for a needle in a haystack?
PD: It can get close to that, yes.
LW: Is it easy to tell if a whale's been injured, from the air?
PD: Well, apparently the report was of an injury on its back, so if the whale is sort of breaching, or near the surface of the water, then we're hopeful that we will be able to determine whether it's the whale that's been injured.
LW: Can you do anything for an injured whale?
PD: Um, other people have been in the water with whales to remove things like fishing line and things tangled around tails of whales and things like that, so it just depends on what the injury is, where we go from there.
LW: Is it possible that we could have a dead whale on our hands?
PD: We don't know at this stage.
LW: Tell me a bit about the reaction to the fact that this whale's been, the possibility that Migaloo might have been injured.
PD: Yeah, we've had media calls from interstate as well as, and of course the local stations, both radio and television.
LW: It doesn't appear Skipper David Snell will face charges, but Queensland's Environment Minister, Dean Wells, has used the incident to remind boaties about taking care during the whale migration season.
DEAN WELLS: I've declared the white whale to be a special interest whale, and it's an offence to bring a boat any closer than 500 metres to a special interest animal. I suppose we've got the legal structure in place, but the law is not capable of preventing accidents, and that's what's happened in this case apparently.
HAMISH ROBERTSON: Queensland's Environment Minister, Dean Wells. And that report was compiled in Brisbane by Louise Willis.
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