fin, humpback, and sperm whales—into the Richmond processing plant.
Each of their five boats would set out through the Golden Gate on 100-mile-long day trips, searching the waters from Bodega Bay down to Monterey. Their gunners fired deck-mounted cannons with explosive harpoons into the whales, reeled in their catch with three-quarter-inch steel cables, lashed them to the side of the boat, and pumped them full of air to keep them from sinking. With one or two whales tied to their gunwales, they’ d head back home to Richmond.
When Ken passed by the whaling station that first evening with his collection of horse lungs, the crews were untying the whale carcasses from the boats and hauling them up the rampway into the processing building. He had smelled the cookers from a mile away. The 40-man Richmond crews could reduce a humpback whale to oil, bone meal, and pet food in an hour and a half. They flensed off the meat in long strips and sold it to Kal Kan dog food in Southern California for 10 cents a pound. They ground the bones into meal for sale to chicken farms. The blubber was cooked down into oil and sold as an additive to margarine, cosmetics, and motor oil.
Watching the whales’ deconstruction gave Ken an idea: Why not conduct a parallel comparative anatomy study using whale lungs as the animal model? His professor endorsed the concept. So several times a week, Ken would stop by the Richmond station and sort through the mountains of oversized organs that Del Monte and Golden Gate discarded as garbage every day. Wading among the maggots that undulated in the ripe tissue and the indescribable aroma of half-rotted offal, Ken would search for an intact lung. It was during one of these gruesome scavenger hunts that Ken discovered his first beaked whale specimen—a rare Baird’s beaked whale head, almost six feet long. It was about to be hauled off with the rest of the refuse when Ken grabbed it with both hands and rolled it off the pile. He was so excited to finally hold a beaked whale head in his hands that he barely minded the stench or the maggots swarming out of its eye sockets.
A week later, Ken heard that a research team had chartered one of Golden Gate’s whaling ships, the
Lynnann
, for a two-week whale-tagging expedition in the Santa Barbara Islands. When Ken discovered that the expedition was being led by the premier American and Japanese cetologists of the day, Dale Rice and Masaharu Nishiwaki, he begged the
Lynnann
’s captain for a job. Any job. When the captain said he needed a dishwasher, Ken pounced.
During Balcomb’s first whale-tagging trip aboard the
Lynnann
, January, 1964. From left to right: Captain Bud Newton, Engineer John Dietrich, Dr. Masaharu Nishiwaki, Cook Bob Young, Dale W. Rice (Expedition Leader), Crewman Ernesto Gonzales, and Ken Balcomb.
Whale tagging dated back to the 1920s when researchers aboard the British vessel
Discovery
set sail for the Southern Ocean to conduct the first scientific survey of whale migrations. The original
Discovery
“tags” were foot-long stainless-steel cylinders engraved with date, the sponsor’s address, and—in the 1920s—the promise of a cash reward to any whaler who found one while flensing or cooking the whale’s blubber and mailed it back to the researchers in London. Comparing the location of the tagging to the location of its recovery, the researchers could then plot the migration path of the whale.
Forty years later, Rice and Nishiwaki decided to use the same tags and tagging method. But it was harder than they had anticipated. You had to stand on the deck of a fast-moving boat giving chase to a whale that surfaced for just a few seconds to breathe. In that instant, you had to fire the tag from a 12-gauge shotgun and hit the whale. If the tag lodged in the tissue below the blubber layer, you had a successful “mark.” But fired from a distance of 100 to 300 feet, most of the tags missed their target altogether or else hit the
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