Dead Whale Gibraltar Point Skegness
Source: Skegness Standard 1985
Whale hunters were out in force on a beach near Skegness at the weekend, after a 50ft Sperm whale was washed up dead at Gibraltar Point.
Representatives of the British Museum were pulling teeth and many local people went down just to look.
Meanwhile, Mr Malcolm Whitehead of East Lindsey District Council’s environmental services was worried.
His problem was how to dispose of it — it was dead and gradually getting very smelly.
“We had two alternatives,” he said. “The first was to wait until the weekend, when there will be a high Spring tide, and tow it out to sea.
“But there are problems with that. We’d have to sink it somehow, and I don’t know how to sink a whale. And by the weekend, it have decomposed so much that it might fall apart when we try to move it.
“The people from the British Museum advised us not to blow it up — not that we were thinking of it — because somebody tried that on the Northumbrian coast and showered Newcastle with whale!”
So Mr Whitehead’s answer was to bury it on the beach.
This has often been done with whales before, but not with one as big as this.
Mr Whitehead said that was was possibly the biggest whale ever to be found in the area, and certainly the biggest in recent years.
Mr Duncan Yeadon of Natureland identified it as a male sperm whale.
Fifty feet long and seven feet high, the whale’s lower jaw was six feet long.
The sperm whale is one of the world’s largest carnivorous creatures, and lives on squid, cuttlefish, octopus and shark, but has been known to swallow humans.
Having found whale bones at Gib point recently …could they relate to whale of 1985? Interestd as approx that year I, along with school group witnessed later stages of burial of whale…it would be fantastic if same whale?
jackie former teacher
I bet it is the same one, Jackie, though over the decades, one or two have been buried there, I think.
My lad also found a whale bone at Gib only a few weeks ago!
WHALE AT GIBRALTER POINT,intresting this story as my son Roan Curtis and his friend Duane Caton was exploring along gibralter point looking for war relics and discovered a carcass of a whale buried in a creek and covered in mud,he came back and told me about it ,so we went back and recovered a rib bone and i think part of a jaw bone we wrapped them in plastic sheeting and carried the bones off the beach and brought them home, the smell was putrid so we washed them down,we still have the bones in our back garden,i wonder if they are the remains of this very same whale.we also found a practice bomb at the same time ,i thought it was dead but when tried to bend the fins back in place which was a stupid thing to do it started to smoke ,so i hosed it down and Duane took it away.i should have known better.