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.
LOUISE WILLIS: You couldn't take any evasive action?
DAVID SNELL: Not at the time that I had to, and doing that speed, we're talking about seconds before I was actually on that area.
LOUISE WILLIS: So it wasn't a deliberate action?
DAVID SNELL: No way.
LOUISE WILLIS: Now, you've got a lot of publicity and a bit of a media frenzy surrounding this event.
DAVID SNELL: Yep.
LOUISE WILLIS: How does it feel to be the man who, I guess, might have run over the white whale, the rare white whale?
DAVID SNELL: 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.
LOUISE WILLIS: 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.
PAUL DICKETTS: 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.
LOUISE WILLIS: But no luck yet?
PAUL DICKETTS: No luck yet.
LOUISE WILLIS: So you're searching for a needle in a haystack?
PAUL DICKETTS: It can get close to that, yes.
LOUISE WILLIS: Is it easy to tell if a whale's been injured, from the air?
PAUL DICKETTS: 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.
LOUISE WILLIS: Can you do anything for an injured whale?
PAUL DICKETTS: 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.
LOUISE WILLIS: Is it possible that we could have a dead whale on our hands?
PAUL DICKETTS: We don't know at this stage.
LOUISE WILLIS: Tell me a bit about the reaction to the fact that this whale's been, the possibility that Migaloo might have been injured.
PAUL DICKETTS: Yeah, we've had media calls from interstate as well as, and of course the local stations, both radio and television.
LOUISE WILLIS: 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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