WHALING OPENS

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 225, 21 June 1939, Page 8

WHALING OPENS

Tory Channel Station’s 17 Humpbacks THRILLING INDUSTRY 112 Years Of Cook Strait Whale-chasing Already the annual winter migration of whales through Cook Strait has begun, and the Tory Channel whalers have opened their hunting season. Up to yesterday, they had caught 17 humpbacks. Yearly the whales of this species leave their summer feeding grounds in the Ross Sea and swim northward to breed in tropic seas. The islands of New Zealand lie athwart their course, and those that strike the South Island coast follow it till the doorway of Cook Strait permits them to continue northward. Ever since New Zealand has been inhabited, Tory Channel whalers have taken toll of the whales as they swim northward through Cook Strait. As long ago as 1827 Jack Guard opened a whaling station at Te Awaiti, and a few years later there were stations operating at Tory, Port Underwood, Cape Campbell, Kapiti and Porirua. as well as farther down the coast at Kaikoura and Banks Peninsula. Today the Tory Channel station, situated a mile nearer the channel mouth than Guard’s original establishment, is the last whaling base on the New Zealand eoast. Names famous among the whalers of 100 years ago, Hebbprley and Love and Jackson and Thoms, are still common among the Tory Channel whalers, farmers, fishermen and settlers. For nearly a century the whaling was carried on in the traditional manner, with five-oared open boats and hand harpoons, and the great sea-beasts were dispatched by. lances, at close Quarters. New methods, which have enabled the station to carry on under modern economic conditions, were introduced a quarter of a century ago byMr. Joe Perano, who is today the owner of the station. He catches whales by spectacular means practised nowhere else in the world. Speedboat Whaling. He hunts down the whales with 40-mile-an-hour speedboats, harpoons them with guns and explosive missiles, and administers the coup de grace with electric-ally-fired gelignite bombs in the heads of lances still hand-thrown into the dying whale. Where many of the whales taken of old were lost because they sank, today the giant carcases are pumped up with air to keep them afloat. Whereas of old it meant often a 12 —or 20—hour tow to bring them ashore, the little steam tender Tuatea tows them home in an hour two at most. Only a few weeks ago the Tuatea lay berthed at the Queen’s Wharf, Wellington, refitting and’overhauling for the opening of the season. Modern Factory Methods. Whereas in former years the carcases had to be laboriously flensed by hand between the tide-marks, and the blubber rendered down in cauldrons or trypots simmering at the head of the beach, today the huge carcases are hauled high and dry on a slipway, and cut up and rendered down by- modern factory processes that eliminate the waste and toil of days gone by. A whale will yield anything up to 25 tons of oil, -which is used in making soap and margarine, for lubricating and burning, dressing leather, quenching steel, waterproofing, tar-sealing roads, and the manufacture of munitions. The biggest whale ever caught at Tory Channel was a blue whale 93ft. long, 90 tons in weight, taken last year. In it was the smallest, a perfectlyformed baby whale no bigger than a man’s finger, and weighing perhaps two ounces. The pursuit is not without danger. Only a year or two ago, Mr. Perano nearly lost his life when a right, whale rose under the boat, setting off the per-cussion-detonated harpoons. He was rushed to hospital with a terribly lacerated leg. Whenever a whale is killed, the whalers range alongside it in their craft, far smaller than their quarry, at imminent peril of being capsized or smashed to plywood by the monster’s flukes. Thus, within 30 miles of Wellington, bold and hardy men risk their lives daily on the wild seas, in the oldest and most thrilling of New Zealand industries. '