July 17- I spoke to the NOAA Law Enforcement agent yesterday and gave him a statement. What was extremely helpful was our behavioral sequencing data that our intern recorded that day, which not only made it possible for me to give the agent an exact position of the incident, but accurate weather and sea conditions, and most importantly, I could let him know that the whale had been up for over 2 minutes and had spouted 9 times just prior to being hit.  The agent told me that these things usually turn around very quickly and he hopes to have a decision this week.

We have complied with NOAA's requests and avoided releasing the boater's information to the public - but it got out there, anyway.  The fact that this generated so much media attention is positive in that hopefully we can prevent this from happening in the future. Boaters need to realize that whales can be anywhere this time of year, and need to be on the lookout to avoid whales or people getting hurt.

As we have done for the past 11 years, we'll continue to photograph every fin whale we can get a look at out on the water, so that we can learn more about this endangered species. The whale that was hit was identified by our Research Coordinator (& Blue Ocean Society co-founder) Dianna Schulte as catalog #0631, a whale that, as far as we can tell, was first seen by us on the Atlantic Queen last September. Hopefully this whale is a Jeffreys Ledge regular and we'll see it again in the near future and can update you on its condition!

Thank you for your interest and hope for a satisfactory resolution to this case!!

- Jen Kennedy, Director & Atlantic Queen Naturalist