Capt. Travis Lovell took pictures of a rotting whale carcass he ran across last week in southern Terrebonne Parish
© Capt. Travis LovellCapt. Travis Lovell took pictures of a rotting whale carcass he ran across last week in southern Terrebonne Parish
If Capt. Ahab really wanted to find the great white whale, maybe he should have spent some time along the Louisiana coast. For the second time in two months, a deceased sperm whale has washed up onto shore in the Bayou State.

In the latest encounter, Capt. Travis Lovell took pictures of a rotting whale carcass Dec. 28 in Terrebonne Parish's Sister Lake. Lovell said the whale had already been discovered by others, but when he got home, he posted the pictures to social media and they went viral.

"I had one client with me that day -- a guy from Minnesota -- and we were pretty much done," Lovell recounted. "Another guide that I network with passed by, and said, 'Man, the craziest thing happened earlier: I could swear I saw a whale this morning.' I said, 'No way. On a scale from 1-10, how sure are you it was a whale?' He said, '9.5.'"

The client and Lovell both wanted to verify the sighting, so they went where the other captain told them, and sure enough, there was a 23 1/2-foot sperm whale tied up to a bulkhead. The stench was borderline unbearable, so Lovell got upwind to snap a few photos with his phone.

"I couldn't understand why it was tied up," Lovell said. "I wondered if a trawler had caught it or if somebody outlawed it and tied it up to come back to get it later."

Lovell called the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries to report the sighting, and was told the agency had actually tied the whale to the bulkhead to keep it from becoming a navigational hazard for boaters. A department biologist said the whale had beached itself along a barrier island a few weeks earlier, and it was still alive when discovered, Lovell said. Personnel dragged it back to sea, and watched as it swam off, but the whale's carcass was discovered Dec. 3 near Turtle Bayou, Lovell said.

That's when the whale was tied to the bulkhead for safety reasons.

Lovell said the whale had at least as much width as his bay boat, which is 102 inches wide. The size of the animal was so impressive, he said he was grateful he didn't run across it over the summer when he was fishing outside areas.

"If you think about it, we could have been fishing at the Pickets and seen that thing when it was alive," he said. "I would have freaked out."

In late October, a beachcomber discovered the carcass of a 21-foot sperm whale on Holly Beach in Cameron Parish.

Neither of the whales was a full-grown specimen. Adult sperm whales can reach nearly 60 feet in length and weigh up to 65 tons.