Whale impaled on cruise ship in Vancouver

As a cruise ship pulled into a Vancouver port, yesterday morning, people nearby saw that a whale was impaled on the ship's bow .

The Princess Cruise Lines' Sapphire Princess docked at the Canada Place terminal Saturday morning. The unexpected sight startled the people gathered there. Jeff MacDonald was there watching the ship come in and said seeing the impaled mammal "was a shock. You don't expect to see something like that and, you know, there's a lot of people staring at it — it's a very sad thing to see — and you kind of wonder how it would happen in the first place. "It wasn't something you wanted to see on a nice Saturday morning in Vancouver." Martha Weber was scheduled to board the ship Saturday afternoon. "I'm a conservationist so that makes me pretty upset and sad. I came here to see them alive in the wild, and this is not what I wanted to see." Weber said. Christianne Wilhelmson is the managing director of the marine conservation group Georgia Strait Alliance. She said incidents like this are all too common. "It's kind of a tragic example of what happens when ships meet whales … There's more and more tanker traffic, there's more and more cruise ship traffic and what you have is an animal that's trying to make its way through all this." Apparently, the ship traffic generates a lot of noise underwater, which confuses the whales. "They can't talk to each other, they can't hear their environment. We're going to have more incidents like this," she said. "It's very possible that what happened here is the animal just had no idea the ship was there and this tragedy happened because of that." Julie Benson, Princess Cruise Lines' spokeswoman said the whale was discovered at 6:30 a.m. PT as the vessel, which takes passengers to and from Alaska, was preparing to dock. "We are saddened and shocked by this discovery and sincerely regret the circumstances which led to the whale's death," she said in a statement. "It is unknown how or when this could have happened as we have strict whale avoidance procedures in place when our ships are in the vicinity of marine life," she said. "We are not aware that any whales were sighted as the ship sailed through the Inside Passage to Vancouver (on Friday). It is necessary for the fisheries department to conduct a necropsy to determine if the ship actually struck the whale while it was alive or if the whale was floating dead at sea and then got caught in the bow.