A 52-foot-long fin whale — a juvenile female — washed up on the sand in Mission Beach early Sunday and was later towed out to sea. A federal fisheries official said it wasn’t immediately apparent why the whale died, but it appeared to have happened recently.
People began calling the stranding network hotline operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration after the whale was discovered on the beach, south of the Crystal Beach pier near Santa Rita Place. Lifeguards were notified around 7 a.m.

Fin whales are the second largest whales in the world — behind blue whales — and as adults can reach 70 to 80 feet long and weigh about 50 tons, or 100,000 pounds. They are endangered and thought to number around 8,000 off the West Coast, according to NOAA.

“It’s probably in the first couple years of its life,” said Michael Milstein, a spokesperson for NOAA Fisheries West Coast region. “It didn’t appear to have been dead very long because there wasn’t much evidence of scavenging or decomposition. But there was also no obvious sign of the cause of death.”

In cases where whales have been killed by ship strikes, there often is evidence of propeller marks and observers didn’t notice anything like that, Milstein said.

Bystanders look at a female fin whale that died and washed onto Mission Beach on Sunday.
Bystanders look at a female fin whale that died and washed onto Mission Beach on Sunday. (K.C. Alfred/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
“It is not clear why it would have died,” he said. He said researchers took tissue samples, which will be analyzed.

NOAA also wanted to make sure people were staying a safe distance from the carcass before it was towed out to sea. The plan was to wait until high tide to tow the whale out to deep water and sink the body.

In order to move the whale, a bulldozer, jet ski and boat worked together to roll and moveit down the sand toward the water. A crowd of roughly 100 people gathered to watch as the whale was pulled by a boat past the surf line around 4 p.m.

After several rope breaks, the whale was finally moved off the beach. Lifeguards towed it about a mile and a half off shore where “it suddenly sunk to the bottom,” lifeguard Lt. Jacob Magness said in a text message.

Jerome Galvin, who was sitting on a beach chair just outside the cones and caution tape near the whale, said he had been watching the process of prepping the carcass for roughly four hours.

“It was kind of slow getting it into the water,” Galvin said. “But once it was in, it was just a matter of waiting on the tide.”

Libby Harris brought her 11-year-old son, Owen, to see the whale discovered just three blocks from their home. Owen said he and his mom had never seen a beached animal of that size.

“It was kind of scary to see a whale dead,” Owen Harris said. “It was just sad.”

Milstein said it is not common to see fin whales stranding along the West Coast. The species tends to stay in deeper water compared to gray whales, which travel from 10,000 to 14,000 miles round-trip up and down the coast in annual migrations.


There has been an increased number of gray whales stranding from Mexico to Alaska since 2019, which prompted NOAA to declare an Unusual Mortality Event. Tests done on the whale bodies that were found showed evidence of emaciation on several of them. However, NOAA said those findings are not consistent across all of the whales examined and said more research will be done.