There is always so much mystery and enigma related to the ocean that even the most professional and competent fishermen can be taken entirely by surprise. One such example is Mark Watkins and his father, who went on a fishing trip off the coast of Western Australia and found themselves looking at a very strange and unusual sight.
Watkins and his father went looking for a big morning catch about 25 nautical miles southwest of Bunbury. The 36-year-old has been fishing since he was just 15 but admitted that he’s never seen anything like what he and his father came across.
A strange massive sphere-like entity was floating in the open water, which looked like something straight out of a science fiction film. At first, the two men thought that the mysterious sphere was either a capsized boat or a crashed hot air balloon. However, as the fishermen approached the odd sight, the disturbing smell answered all of their questions. With closer inspection, there was no mistaking what this strange bulbous thing truly was.
Mark Watkins and his father soon realized that what they had come across was a swollen corpse of a dead whale. ‘Its stomach was full of gas, so it was all bloated up,’ Watkins told The West Australian. ‘When we got closer, we realized it had to be a dead whale because of the smell.’ Mark shared pictures of the sight on a local Facebook page for the Bunbury and Districts Power Boat Club/Fishing Club, where they quickly went viral.
When you stumble upon a whale corpse like this, you’d imagine that a shark-feeding frenzy would naturally occur. However, at the time Mark and his father were there, they only saw one shark. ‘We actually did have a 3.5 to 4m white pointer around our boat that day - it seemed more interested in our boat than the whale,’ Watkins told The West Australian.
While Watkins and his father continued fishing, when they headed back to shore, the whale wasn’t in the same state. The sharks found their way to the massive whale corpse, and after taking chunks out of it, the whale’s body was no longer inflated.
