| Summary: | It was february 1966, and Richard Stroud had seal sex on his mind. A recent graduate of Oregon State University, the Portland-born Stroud had taken a job at the Marine Mammal Biological Laboratory in Seattle. For one of his first field assignments, he had come to Morro Bay to study the reproduction of northern fur seals in their wintering area off the California coast. The primary focus of the lab, which was still administered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, remained the fur seal harvest on the Pribilof Islands, and its scientists retained close ties to US whaling firms, often chartering their vessels for research. For this seventy-day expedition, Stroud and his colleagues hired the 136-foot whaler Lynnann for the purpose of shooting and dissecting five hundred fur seals under the terms of the 1957 treaty. Stroud also had instructions to kill and examine killer whales when possible. So when the Lynnann passed six orcas off Morro Bay just before noon on February 12, he asked Captain Roy J. “Bud” Newton to follow them. Ordinarily, Newton wouldn’t have bothered with killers. His employer, the Del Monte Fishing Company, focused on fin, sperm, and humpback whales. Located in Richmond, a short drive from Berkeley, the station processed nearly two hundred whales per year. But the whaling season was months away, and the US government was paying for this voyage. Newton wheeled the Lynnann around, and after an hour-long chase, his crew harpooned and killed a large male killer whale. Measuring just under twenty-one feet, it was a healthy specimen, though its teeth seemed unusually worn. Stroud planned to examine the orca’s stomach contents and send its skull and organs to the Seattle lab. Yet he chose not to dissect the carcass in port. Instead, as one reporter explained, Stroud and his fellow researchers “planned to butcher their killer whale Sunday while far out at sea.” The reasons for this decision are unclear. Perhaps they hoped to spare Morro Bay residents the stench of orca innards.
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