Lash Me Up

A humpback whale with a broken spine and a paralyzed tail swam over 3,000 miles from British Columbia to Hawaii using only her pectoral fins. She did the breaststroke across the Pacific.

Her designation was BCX1232. Researchers called her Moon. The Fin Island Research Station in Gitga'at First Nations territory on British Columbia's north coast had been documenting her every September for over a decade as she fed on krill in the coastal waters before migrating south to Hawaii for the winter. In 2020, they photographed her with a calf, teaching it the route. She was healthy, strong, and doing what humpback whales in the northeast Pacific have done for thousands of years: feeding in Canada, breeding in Hawaii, and covering the distance between them twice every year.

On September 7, 2022, a drone operated by BC Whales flew over Moon as she passed the Fin Island station. The footage showed something wrong with her body. Her spine, normally straight, had an enormous S-shaped curve running from her dorsal fin to her fluke. The tail hung at an angle that made normal swimming impossible.

Humpback whales propel themselves with powerful vertical strokes of the tail. Moon's tail was paralyzed. Janie Wray, CEO of BC Whales and co-founder of the North Coast Cetacean Society, reviewed the drone footage and concluded that Moon had been struck by a vessel. Her gut told her it was a mid-sized boat, thirty to sixty feet, moving at twenty to thirty knots, hitting the whale across the middle of the body.

When Moon was filmed in September, she still carried fat reserves from the feeding season. She was injured but not yet starving. She was alone. The calf from 2020 was not with her. Nobody knew whether she would attempt the migration.

On December 1, a whale-watching vessel off Olowalu on the west coast of Maui reported a sick whale in the water. Researchers with the Pacific Whale Foundation reached the site and identified the animal. It was Moon, 3,000 miles from where she had been photographed three months earlier, her spine still twisted into the same S-shape, her tail still useless. She had crossed the open Pacific without the primary propulsion system her species depends on.

Wray later told The Guardian that Moon had done the breaststroke to make the migration, pulling herself forward with her pectoral fins the way a human swimmer pulls through the water with their arms.
The crossing had destroyed her. She was emaciated. Whale lice covered her body in numbers that indicated she had been moving too slowly to shed them naturally. A healthy humpback cruises at three to nine miles per hour. Moon, pulling herself with her pectoral fins against 3,000 miles of open ocean, had been moving slowly enough for parasites to accumulate on her skin the way barnacles accumulate on a dock.

BC Whales posted about her arrival in Hawaii under the heading "Tenacity & Tragedy." They wrote that she was likely in considerable pain for the entire journey, that this is the stark reality of a vessel strike, and that it speaks to the extended suffering whales can endure afterward. They also wrote that it speaks to their instinct and culture: the lengths whales will go to follow patterns of behavior.

Nobody knows why Moon migrated. Humpbacks travel to Hawaii to breed and give birth. Moon may have been pregnant. She may have been following the only behavioral pattern her species has, the same route she had traveled every year for fifteen years, the same route she had taught her calf two years earlier. The injury did not erase the migration. It did not override the drive. She was a forty-ton animal with a broken back pulling herself across the Pacific with her arms because the calendar said it was time to go south.

Wray told CBC that Moon would not survive the return trip to British Columbia in the spring. By mid-January 2023, Moon had not been sighted in Hawaiian waters for weeks. She was never seen again. Researchers presume she died somewhere off the Hawaiian Islands, 3,000 miles from the feeding grounds where she had spent every summer for a decade, having completed a migration that her body was no longer built to make.

Four humpback whales were found dead along the British Columbia coast between October and November 2022, all with injuries consistent with vessel strikes. Wray's message after Moon's crossing was simple: slow down. Humpbacks surface without warning. They sleep just below the waterline. They nurse their calves in shipping lanes. The most important thing anyone on the water can do, she said, is reduce speed in areas where whales are known to be present. Moon was struck somewhere in those waters, kept swimming for three months on pectoral fins alone, and made it to Hawaii because a 3,000-mile migration was still easier for her than stopping.

Source: BC Whales, December 2022. Pacific Whale Foundation. CBC News, December 8, 2022. CBS News, December 16, 2022. Big Island Now, January 16, 2023. Janie Wray, North Coast Cetacean Society.

I just wanted to thank everyone who wrote words of encouragement regarding my last post and supported me. I have commented on those posts and I have reported them to Facebook. Hopefully those reviews will be removed, but in the meantime I appreciate all of your kind words, support and encouragement.
xoxo Lise 💕

I'm appalled to see that strangers that I had never met or worked on gave me bad reviews. And they were all on the same day, May 28th, 2025.
I'm the first to admit I'm not great with social media or technology in general and I probably should keep an eye on things better but today I looked at my Lash Me Up page for the first time since my husband passed away last year and noticed that I had an 88% recommendation rating which I thought was strange since I've always had five stars reviews. Then I saw the reason why. Four people that I've never worked on and never met gave me terrible reviews on the same day, May 28th 2025.
I went back in my calendar and I never worked on these people; Carrie-Lynn McInnes, Kristen Andrea, Maie-Adele Lombard, and Emma Grace Lombard.
I am absolutely disgusted that people think it's okay to tarnish somebody's business like this. So disappointed 😞