By admin 
Fisherman Denny Glover couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
Glover, a retired residential contractor, was out fishing for salmon and striped bass on Wednesday, Sept. 16, near the Rio Vista Bridge with friends.
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“One of my buddies said, ‘I just saw a whale,’ Glover told The Sacramento Bee. “I didn’t believe him.”
But sure enough, there was an adult humpback whale in the Sacramento River in front of the men, far from the open sea.
“It was exciting, it was unusual, and completely unexpected,” Glover said.
The whale, since identified by the Marine Mammal Center in Marin as CRC-11620, has been spotted up and down the California coast more than a dozen times in the last 24 years.
It’s unusual for whales to venture into the Delta. In 1985, a humpback known as Humphrey swam under the Rio Vista Bridge and wound up in a slough 33 miles from downtown Sacramento, prompting a high-stakes rescue effort when the freshwater environment started making him ill. In 1990, during a stint in the San Francisco Bay, Humphrey beached himself on a mudflat, necessitating another rescue.
In 2007, a mother humpback whale and her calf ventured even further into the Delta. The two whales, nicknamed Delta and Dawn, eventually made their way back down the river and back to the open sea.
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On Wednesday, Sept. 16, Glover and his friends watched the whale for nearly half an hour, recording video as they watched. “It kept going up towards the Rio Vista Bridge,” he recalled, and at one point it breached in response to an oncoming barge. In turn, Glover said, the barge moved to give the animal a wide berth.
The Marine Mammal Center, which responded to both the 1985 and the 2007 whale incursions, confirmed through the Cascadia Research Collective’s photo-identification catalog that the whale seen in the Sacramento River Delta was the same one spotted in the San Francisco Bay the day prior. The Center is asking the public to steer clear of the mammal.
“This whale is in an out of normal habitat area,” said Kathi George, director of Cetacean Conservation Biology at The Marine Mammal Center. “Our team is actively monitoring the situation, and we kindly ask the public to please avoid changing the whale’s course and let the animal decide where it wants to go.” The whale may choose to linger in the Delta, according to the Center.
In the statement, the Center noted that the whale’s gender is unknown, and that the public can view its migration history on the citizen science website happywhale.com. CRC-11620 has been given the nickname “Rio,” for its “excursion well out of humpback whale habitat in San Francisco Bay towards Rio Vista,” noted the Happywhale website.
Other than staying 100 yards away from the whale at all times, not crowding or pursuing it, and staying alert out on the water, the Center also noted that locals can help by sending any sightings of it to their website or the WhaleAlert app.
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