Yukon Harbor orca capture operation
15 southern resident orcas were trapped by Ted Griffin and his Seattle Public Aquarium party on 15 February 1967, in Yukon Harbor on the west side of Puget Sound.
His wealth of experiences led to preparations of unique equipment and methods in order to realize the deliberate capture of multiple orcas.
Just a week before the Yukon Harbor capture operation, the death in Newfoundland of a trapped fin whale called Moby Joe was lamented by Farley Mowat.
[14] The incident would be the subject of his 1972 book A Whale for the Killing,[15] which would be inspirational for Greenpeace activist and orca scientist Paul Spong, whose life would be deeply affected by his relationship with Skana, who was captured in Yukon Harbor.
Griffin managed to tame Namu to the point where the big killer whale permitted his owner to ride him bareback and performed several tricks.
The necropsy actually evidenced that he had been ill with an "acute bacterial infection, likely contracted from sewage runoff in Elliott Bay" where Griffin had moved him.
[22] His most immediate orders would come from SeaWorld San Diego, and Portland, Oregon Boat Show producer Bob O'Loughlin,[23] who had tried to capture orcas at Seattle even before the captivity of Moby Doll in 1964.
"Namu, Inc., initially founded to control marketing and merchandising for the world's only captive orca, became the whale-catching arm of the Seattle Marine Aquarium" which he owned.
[4] In the late summer of 1966, Ted Griffin was planning not only to find a replacement for Namu at his Seattle Public Aquarium, but also to fill orders from other enterprises.
[25] Yet during the fall salmon run when Tacoma waters "teemed with the huge mammals" which "romped to the delight of shoreline spectators," Griffin himself did not appear to be interested in catching an orca at that time.
This rifle was suggested and lent to Ted Griffin by the Marine Mammal Biological Laboratory,[5] a little-known section of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.
"Located on the Sand Point Naval Air Station near the University of Washington, the lab was the only facility in North America devoted exclusively to the study of marine mammals.
"[24] Their theory behind Griffin's potential use of the Greener rifle was that the harpoon it fired would be too light to penetrate the blubber of a large orca and cause serious injury.
As the local orcas always stuck together in large pods, the buoys trailing behind a harpooned individual would make it possible to track a number of them.
[5] Crucially, to enable Griffin to spot and fire upon the fast and elusive animals, he had aircraft available "supplied by Lake Union Air Service and Seattle Helicopter Airways.
[29] To initially find the orcas, Ted Griffin created a spotting network and appealed to the public for information, saying that the aquarium would accept collect calls with sightings.
[17] At the start of 1967, Ted Griffin, director of the Seattle Public Aquarium on Pier 56, began actively searching for a replacement for Namu, who had died the previous July.
They picked up the orcas off Point Robinson in the afternoon, and followed them all night, but on the Sunday, in a winter storm with 70 mile-an-hour (113 kph) gusts, they lost them.
[30] Ted Griffin had lost track of the southern resident orcas in January, but on February 14 he was notified "by the Coast Guard that killer whales had been spotted at Port Angeles, Washington, headed" towards Puget Sound.
In a sheltered cove named Yukon Harbor on the Kitsap Peninsula south of Bainbridge Island, over depths ranging from 42 to 84 feet (13 to 26 metres), the fishing vessel Chinook laid out its 3,960-foot-long (1,210 m) modified seine net.
[35] February 15 had ended with a large number of southern resident orcas trapped inside a seine net, but "no one had ever attempted to sort and separate killer whales."
"[37] Griffin's chief assistant Don Goldsberry explained that they were targeting "whales between 13 and 16 feet (4.0 and 4.9 metres) because those are the ideal size for training or working with for scientific purposes."
The first attempt to drive selected orcas into a smaller, 80-by-80-foot (24-by-24-metre) holding pen failed however when they broke through the leader net being used to tighten their space.
Two orcas had been trapped in the holding pen, which was towed closer to shore in order to transfer one to a tank truck for the trip to Portland.
[45] The dead orca was turned over to the Marine Mammal Biological Laboratory of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service for studies before being rendered.
After the orcas remained trapped in Yukon Harbor for a week, Griffin began feeding the pod 200 pounds (91 kilograms) of salmon daily.
[43] A controversy characteristic of the times erupted around the chairman of the University of Washington pharmacology department over his suggestion that LSD experiments could be conducted on the orcas, as a comparison with those on other dolphin species and elephants, but there is no evidence they took place.
This orca, transferred across Puget Sound aboard the seiner Chinook to Griffin's Pier 56 aquarium in Seattle, was "a nine-foot (2.7-metre) suckling calf," estimated to be "seven to eight months old.
[7] By this time, Griffin had concluded that "his plans to provide a rental whale for the Portland Boat, Sports and Trailer Show" were dead.
"[46] "Protests grew when photos emerged of one of the dead whales hanging from the boom of the Marine Mammal Biological Laboratory's research vessel."
