By William Goodwin, Special to the Star-Bulletin
A mother humpback whale and her calf made a
surprise visit to Pearl Harbor this weekend.

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Mother whale, calf
visit Pearl Harbor

The Navy halts boat traffic
so the humpbacks would
not be afraid

By Lori Tighe
Star-Bulletin

A visit from a mother humpback whale and her calf that managed to navigate through Pearl Harbor's busy, narrow entrance, stopped boat traffic this weekend.

Spotted in the harbor Saturday morning, the whales caused a commotion as the Navy worked until nightfall with National Marine Fisheries Service to prevent them from stranding themselves in fear.

Then as unexpectedly as the mother and child arrived, they apparently found their way back out of the harbor channel just a few hundred yards wide, said Navy officials.

They found no sign of the whales yesterday.

"In my 20 years I've never heard of whales entering Pearl Harbor because the entrance is so narrow and the traffic is so heavy," said John Naughton of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The endangered humpback whales, which come to Hawaii to bear calves, seek coastal waters and have occasionally wandered into harbors -- but not Pearl Harbor, Naughton said.

"To go in such a restricted area is strange," he said.

The Navy's sonar experiments being conducted off the Big Island's Kona Coast on singing humpback males would be too far away to have caused this unusual occurance, Naughton said.

Opponents of the tests fear the low frequency sonar experiments may disorient the whales, which rely heavily upon sound for survival. Naughton attributed the whales' risky excursion to curiosity.

"No one can recollect whales coming into Pearl Harbor," said Lt. Cmdr. Rod Gibbons.

When the whales made their appearance, the Navy stopped nonmilitary boat traffic from entering or leaving the harbor through yesterday, Gibbons said.

"The last thing we wanted to do was to scare the whales and cause them to strand themselves," Gibbons said. "So we went to the whale experts, the National Marine Fisheries, and asked them what to do."

The National Marine Fisheries recommended against herding the animals, which could drive them ashore on the mud flats. They also suggested blocking off West Loch, the harbor's most shallow area, with floating barriers used to contain oil spills, to keep out the whales.

Although the barriers rest on the ocean's surface, whales avoid passing under man-made structures, Naughton said.

Luckily for both the whales and the Navy, the mother and calf dropped in on a weekend when the harbor traffic was slower than usual.