Mark Watkins must have thought he’d landed in an episode of The X-Files when he encountered this monstrous object floating near his boat. The object was huge, pink, fleshy and bobbing along with the waves. The Bunbury fisherman soon figured out that it was not a hot air balloon, nor an abandoned blimp, nor a capsized boat, but the floating carcass of a dead whale.
“It‘s stomach was full of gas so it was all bloated up,” Watkins told The West Australian, “When we got closer we realised it had to be a dead whale because of the smell.”
Watkins, 36, had been out fishing with his dad about 25 miles out from the south west coast of Bunbury on Wednesday morning when he came across the carcass. The behemoth whale was already being eyed off by a few circling sharks.
“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,” said Mark.
The two fishermen noted that the whale was decidedly less bloated on their second sighting of it, after the sharks had gotten their fill.
