22 years later, humphrey the hunchback still speaks

Humphrey caught the imagination of thousands

by Steve Rubenstein,
San Francisco Chronicle
17 May 2007

It's been 22 years, but the Bay Area still remembers its most celebrated mixed-up marine visitor.

Like many of his fellow mammals on land, he was stubborn, blubbery and off-course.

His name was Humphrey the humpback whale, and for 26 days in the fall of 1985, his confusion and courage were front-page news. Humphrey was the stuff of which instant legends and quickie $10 T-shirts are born.

Ten thousand gawkers a day lined the shores of the Sacramento River and its sloughs to catch a glimpse. Sailboaters, jet skiers and houseboaters cruised by. Vendors hawked souvenirs. Restaurants named dishes after him.

There were Humphrey maps, Humphrey posters and Humphrey pundits. Everyone had an explanation why the 40-ton leviathan left its normal Alaska-to-Mexico migration route and turned left under the big orange bridge. But most experts said Humphrey just got lost and, like countless males before him, was unable to ask for directions.

As with the two whales that swam up the river this week all the way to West Sacramento, Humphrey's health was a constant concern. For Humphrey and for the thousands who became attached to him, the outcome was a happy one.

Humphrey was first spotted off Oakland on Oct. 10, 1985. From there he swam up the Carquinez Strait, the Sacramento River and under the Rio Vista Bridge to a dead-end slough 69 miles from the ocean.

He survived low bridges, wooden pilings, sludgy water, hovering helicopters, outboard motors and the banging of loud pipes by a small armada of well-wishers attempting to steer him back toward the Golden Gate and out to sea.

The delta town of Rio Vista installed a stone monument to the whale. (It's still there.) The pizzeria named its combo the Humphrey Special. (It's now $20 for an extra large.) A TV anchorwoman wrote a kids book about the whale. (It was selling Wednesday on Amazon.com for 40 cents.)

There were generic, plastic toy whales that weren't selling too well until they were re-branded as Humphrey whales.

Humphrey, like the two whales this week, swam past the delta town of Rio Vista. At Betty's Striper Cafe, it's whale deja vu. The whales may have moved farther north, but if they return to the ocean they will have to pass Rio Vista again.

At any event, the restaurant has been jammed with tourists, and the whale watcher's breakfast special is once-again chicken fried steak.

"This is definitely good for us,'' said manager Tasha Marlowe. "This is a sleepy town in the middle of the sleepy delta. Nothing much happens here.''

For a time, Humphrey didn't have a name -- until the Chronicle reporter assigned to the story christened him.

Birney Jarvis, who covered the whale for its entire 26-day visit, recalled that everyone he talked to wanted to know the whale's name, and that it was taking up interviewing time.

"So I decided to name him,'' Jarvis said. "I said to myself, 'Humpback ... Humphrey.' It just seemed to fit.'' Jarvis said he credited the name to a Rio Vista restaurateur he was interviewing, who didn't mind accepting the honor.

Jarvis, now 77 and retired from the Chronicle for 20 years, recalled that the whale's saga "seemed to strike a chord with the whole Bay Area.'' "Thousands of people were lining the shore to watch him,'' he recalled. "I don't mean hundreds. I mean thousands. The response was awesome. It was just something that happened at the moment. It was like Woodstock. And it was so different from all the blood and guts in the paper at the time.''
For a time, volunteers trailing behind in boats tried a pipe-banging strategy favored by Japanese fishermen to drive Humphrey back to his home in the open sea. But animal recording expert Bernie Krause, who records wildlife sounds for movie studios, won over authorities with his proposal to play a recording of hungry humpback whales that he acquired from students in Hawaii. The idea was that Humphrey would go where he thought the food was. Krause spent long hours in the recording studio doctoring the original whale recording from its one-minute length into a 20-minute-long whale symphony. He had worried that Humphrey would get bored with the same one-minute snippet over and over. Krause loaded his recording equipment into a small boat and began playing the tape through an underwater speaker. Humphrey began following the boat, from the Antioch Bridge toward the Golden Gate. "You never saw anything like it,'' Krause recalled. "Thousands of people, screaming and yelling. Every time the animal surfaced there was this huge roar from the crowds. It really brought people together. Everyone had some way of associating or projecting onto that animal.''
By the time he swam back under the Golden Gate on Nov. 4, 1985, Humphrey had racked up a rescue bill estimated at $80,000. He paid a second bay visit in 1990, when volunteers used a net to pull him off a mudflat near Candlestick Park. The next year, he was spotted off the Farallones. Now, Krause is set to play the next generation of humpback recordings for the new arrivals. They're no longer on cassette tape, he said. They're digital. Krause recorded a new set of high-fidelity humpback sounds in Glacier Bay, Alaska, and he can't wait to try them out. "I'd be glad to help,'' he said. "What you need to do is lure the animal with something pleasant. Loud noises don't work. It's so much better to be positive than negative.''