Whale of a Tale

by - July 22, 2010

My family goes "boating" all the time. Now by boating I don't mean we all put on our sailing clothes and take our yacht out to sea. As a matter of fact, our boat is nothing like a yacht.
See? Much smaller and better suited to the waves of the lake or river.

We've never had anything jump up out of the water into our boat, and we've never had a bird land on it while we were on it. We've talked about the possibilities of snakes falling out of the trees (heaven forbid) on our heads and gotten close enough to alligators that, had they wanted to, they could have climbed on board with us. And this one time the people that own the boat in the background had a wharf rat turn their old boat into a home - a fact we all discovered on an afternoon river outing. Do you have any idea how BIG those things are?!

Yesterday CNN refused to be cooperative and I was unable to use the Jeanne Moos story I wanted in my D block. My original plan was to fit the "Whoopi Stoned On Air" package into today's show, but while I was searching the CNN bitcentral site for said story I found another Moos piece that actually flowed better with a story I already had - "Whale Crashes Boat." I decided to put it after the story "Water Wars". Nice, eh?

Anyway, what would you do if this happened to you?
That's a 40-ton whale. It just jumped up out of the water off South Africa and actually landed on the boat's mast. And what, you may ask, happens when a 40-ton whale jumps on your boat's mast. Well, I've got your answer...
That looks pretty bad, right? Well, not to worry. The mast is the only thing that was broken. The two sailors on board at the time weren't injured and, aside from leaving a little blubber on the boat's deck, neither was the whale. As a matter of fact, the whale was pretty happy.
There he goes swimming off into the sunset, seemingly oblivious to the $5,000 worth of damage he caused Ralph Mothes and Paloma Werner.

To see some more pictures of the damaged boat, as well as the ones I used, go HERE.

I was going to share the Jeanne Moos story but YouTube has decided it doesn't want to cooperate. So try looking it up yourself if you really want to see it.

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2 comments

  1. reason # 4,000,000 for me not to go into the water! gah! like the movie "open water" wasn't reason enough!

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  2. I actually have never seen that movie... but I have seen lots of movies about sharks going crazy and nobody can forget Lake Placid.

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