Whale trapped in French estuary successfully freed | Abroad

“She’s through! We saw them swim away, that was fantastic!”, they say enthusiastically. “I have no words to describe this, we only experience this once in a lifetime,” says Grégory Perissel. He had gone down to the estuary with his children.

The 10-metre-tall animal got stuck yesterday in an estuary of the Rance, near a tidal power plant in Saint-Malo. The humpback whale failed to return to the sea on its own. Several nature organizations, the maritime gendarmerie and scientists had gathered this morning to free the animal. It is the first time since the tidal power plant came into operation in 1966 that a cetacean has been trapped there.

The whale had been swimming ten-kilometer tours between the tidal power station and the village of Plouër-sur-Rance since yesterday afternoon. Since there was no indication that the animal was in poor health, an immediate attempt was made to lead it back to the sea. That was not easy as there was a considerable difference in height in the water between the power station and the sea. By opening all the valves of the plant simultaneously, there was enough water at high tide for the animal to get back to the sea.

“Everything went smoothly,” says Thierry Buanic. As chairman of nature organization Al Lark, he helped free the whale. According to the man, it is very exceptional that animals of that size make it back to the sea alive after they have swam stuck in a river.

On August 10, a beluga weighing 800 kilograms was stuck in the Seine. After a week, the vet had to make the difficult decision to put the whale to sleep.