Beaked whale beached near Cape Town

A beaked whale that washed ashore on Sunday morning was found dead on Long Beach, Hout Bay, by walkers and members of the town's National Sea and Rescue Institute (NSRI) team. The cause of death has not yet been established.

Annie Bradshaw and Lee Otter said they were walking on the beach when other walkers asked them to call authorities about a beached dolphin.

They searched the beach for 15 minutes, came across an animal they thought was too big to be a dolphin and phoned the NSRI about 11.45am.

NSRI coxswain Ian Klopper and his team attached a rope to the whale's tail and tried to pull it out of the water with a Primi Sea rescue vehicle.

The whale, which weighed an estimated one ton to 1,5 tons, according to Marine and Coastal Management (MCM) spokesperson Mike Meyer, could not be moved far enough with the vehicle.

An NSRI deep-sea rescue craft was then used to tow the whale back to sea where a larger vessel, the MCM's Pegasus, could take over. The carcass is to be examined to determine the cause of death.

It could end up in the Cape Town Museum, said Yohan de Witt, chief marine conservation protector for the MCM.

Inspectors said the whale was about 30 years old.

It had three wounds that Meyer identified as bites from "cookie cutter sharks" that prey on whales.

They said it was probably a True's Beaked whale, a deep diver that feeds on squid and is rarely seen near the shore. True's Beaked whales are most commonly found off New Zealand and were first sighted in South African waters in 1959.

"I can't see any reason at all why it has beached," said Meyer, who called it a fairly valuable animal scientifically and said there was a small chance it could be a rarer Hector's Beaked whale.

A Hout Bay police officer accompanied Meyer to the beach to put the whale down, but it died before they arrived.

PJ Veldhuizen, an NSRI trainee coxswain, said that before the whale, the most recent beachings in the area had been in August, when dolphins came ashore in False Bay.