Eliot Kleinberg
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Thursday, Sept. 2, 2010
www.http://palmbeachpost.com
DELRAY BEACH — When a passerby told Chris Hogan, fishing at dawn today for blue crab, that a 7-foot whale had come ashore with the high tide and died, he calmly walked over, pulled his fishing knife and cut away two feet of it, tail and all.
Why?
“To eat it!” he exclaimed, puffing on a butt in a pastel shirt and pith helmet.
Hogan, 60, a 34-year Delray Beach resident, said a lifeguard then informed him it was illegal.
On the beach, just south of Atlantic Avenue, swimmers, police and reporters milled at yellow crime scene tape framing a 40-by-40 foot square. The decomposing carcass was at center and the tail assembly off to the side, Hogan’s orange fishing glove still lying on it.
Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission Lt. Atwell Pride and two Delray Beach officers walked him to a cruiser to go to police headquarters.
“I apologize to the state of Florida,” Hogan told Pride as he collected his tackle box and bait bucket. “I pay my taxes and I didn’t know it was illegal. I do now.”
Pride said federal agencies might charge Hogan and a second man who helped him cut up the whale. Pride and federal officials would not identify the second man, citing an ongoing investigation.
Hogan said later today he’d never met the man.
“He just pulled the flukes back while I cut the thing,” Hogan said. “He was walking down the beach. Some man from New York.”
Hogan said state and federal officials grilled him at length.
“I asked them if I was going to jail,” he said. “They laughed.”
And, he said, “I’ve been unemployed for over two years. The last thing I need is a big fine.”
A first-time collecting of parts carries a civil fine of $250 to $800. If criminal charges were filed, the penalty would range up to $100,000 and a year in jail.
“They were very nice to me,” Hogan said of the agents. “They said, ‘Were you planning to sell it?’ I said, ‘No, I was planning to eat it. Because I’d never eaten whale before.”
He said he would have broiled or fried the thin ring of meat just beneath the whale’s skin. He also planned to use the flukes for a soup.
Hogan said he wasn’t worried about health issues because the body still was warm and there was only one fly on it.
“The tide was still going out. So it (the whale) hadn’t been there that long. The sand was still wet,” he said.
Hogan, whose former careers were in tropical plants and antiques, said he meant no harm.
If it had been alive I’d have been the first one to find somebody with a cell phone,” he said.
“I really screwed up,” Hogan sighed. “I’m really quite embarrassed about the whole damn thing, to be honest with you.”
The animal probably was a pygmy sperm or a dwarf sperm, neither of them threatened or endangered, spokeswoman Kim Amendola said from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries service in St. Petersburg.
But she said the two men still could be charged with violating the Marine Mammals Act, which protects all sea mammals, regardless of status, and forbids killing or even possessing parts of them.
A necropsy is planned to try to learn why the animal beached itself, NOAA fisheries marina mammal biologist Erin Fougeres, said today. But she said that must wait for the criminal investigation.
“It’s going to go into a freezer,” she said.
Staff writer Sonja Isger and staff photographer Lannis Waters contributed to this report.
The eyes of the world are focused on “the little town with the really big secret” this week as September 1, the official start of the dolphin hunt has finally come.
