NEW YORK (AP) – It took two attempts Thursday, but a baby whale that died in a small Brooklyn bay after swimming aimlessly in its waters for two days was pulled out with the help of two NYPD divers.

The first attempt a few hours earlier by the Army Corps of Engineers failed when a rope tied around the whale’s tail loosened and the mammal plunged to the depths of the harbor, 30 feet below.

The Army Corps sent in a work boat, Hayward, with a 20-ton capacity crane to retrieve the carcass, which had been left overnight tied to a pier at the Hess Oil Field at Gowanus Pier.

Two police officers, Detective Mike Cocchi, 39 and Sergeant Paul Reynolds, 40, of the NYPD scuba team, arrived a short time later and successfully retrieved the whale less than an hour later, despite “zero visibility” underwater.
“I bumped into the whale’s tail on the first pass,” Sergeant Reynolds said.

Over the years, the officers have retrieved all kinds of evidence. But “this is my first whale,” Sergeant Reynolds noted.

The Army Corps of Engineers said that in the past five years it has retrieved four dead whales in and around New York Harbor, ranging in length from 50 to 60 feet. The whale retrieved Thursday was a baby, only 12 feet long, and had bloody marks on its belly.

It died about 5 p.m. Wednesday. The end was witnessed by spectators who had been drawn to the dock area in Gowanus Bay by news accounts.

Tim Lafontaine, of the Army Corps, said it could have taken two days for the carcass, about 3,500 to 5,000 pounds, to surface on its own. If it was not retrieved, it could have posed navigational hazards.

Once Cocchi and Reynolds wrapped a yellow rope around the whale’s tail, it was hooked to the Hayward’s derrick and laid on its deck. The Hayward then headed for an Army Corps of Engineers dock at Caven Point, in Jersey City, N.J., where marine experts were to perform a necropsy later Thursday to determine the cause of death.

Animal activists said the minke whale, about a year old, had been too young to survive on its own.

“It’s very sad,” said Kim Durham, a rescue specialist at the Long Island-based Riverhead Foundation for Research and Preservation, who had monitored the troubled animal’s activities around the clock. “It was a very young whale that became confused and disoriented.”

Earlier, experts had reported seeing nothing to indicate the mammal was sick, such as swimming erratically or in tight circles. With only the whale’s dorsal fin visible at times, observers could only guess whether it might have been injured.

Ms. Durham had expressed hope earlier that the whale would find its way back into open water in New York harbor. But she said the situation took a bad turn early Wednesday afternoon, when the whale’s swimming patterns changed.

Ms. Durham said a colleague, marine biologist Robert DiGiovanni, was observing the animal when “it suddenly began heavy splashing, hit the dock and then just went quiet.”

The whale was first spotted on Tuesday in Gowanus Bay, a small estuary off industrial south Brooklyn that is the outlet from the Gowanus canal, a narrow 1.2-mile waterway once lined with pollution-generating coal yards, scrap yards and small industries.

The canal has improved in recent years due to environmental cleanup efforts. After a huge underwater fan, designed to keep the water flowing, was reactivated, crabs and other marine creatures began turning up. But Robert Guskind, founder of Gowanuslounge.com, said the recent major storm would have sent more raw sewage into the canal.

He said the whale story had generated a lot of traffic on his Web site, which is about life and real estate development in Brooklyn.

“People are concerned about the creature’s ability to survive,” he said. “Quite honestly it could not have picked a worse spot.”

The estuary is lined with docks, storage warehouses and a large fuel oil depot.

Minke whales are a subspecies of baleen whales, common in northern Atlantic waters, and feed on plankton and krill. They are not known for singing like their cousins the humpback whales. Underwater listening devices picked up only a few “grunts” in the Gowanus waters, Ms. Durham said.

___

On the Net: http://www.gowanuslounge.com