Another HUGE event in Suwarrow! We were out exploring in the dinghy when Timothy spotted an enormous sperm whale washed up on an outer reef.

We were all very dubious when Timothy started yelling, "Hey, I see a whale". There was grey lump on the edge of the atoll that looked like an enormous rock or an old shipwreck. After hiking to the edge of the reef we found it was indeed a male sperm whale in the surf line. The whale was just starting to smell, but staying upwind you could walk right up to it. None of us had ever seen a sperm whale before and it was an amazing experience standing along side a 50' whale and looking into a mouth 10' long and full of gigantic teeth.

When we told the caretaker about it, he was really excited and somehow Wayne from Daydream and I ended up volunteered to go back out at low tide and take measurements and cut the lower jaw off for the museum in Raratonga. Talk about gross, knee deep in the surf attempting to cut the bottom jaw off a whale with a hand saw while waves tried to sweep us deep into the whale's open mouth. Once washed under a dead whale, I was pretty sure Mary would have just left me on the reef due to the stench. It was definitely a wild, once in a lifetime adventure. We ended up cutting off 4' of jaw weighing about 200 lbs and looking like something from an absurd monster movie set. After hours more work, next section of jaw was promptly picked up by a huge wave and washed off the reef. By the end of the day, we were exhausted, thoroughly sick of this particular whale, and had cut off all the jaw that we could tow back to the caretaker's island.

We hauled it all up on the beach for the rest of the cruisers to see, scrubbed ourselves for hours, and then burned our clothes. What an experience.