Jonah is the Whale (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine August 2001

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Jonah is the Whale (Cont.)


	Keiko HQ at Iceland's Heimaey Island

HEIMAEY HARBOR IS, as Herman Melville once wrote, "cold as Iceland." With its vertiginous cliff faces and petrified volcano cones, Heimaey offers one of the most wildly beautiful landscapes in the country. But the tiny strip of land, dotted with two-story cottages roofed in a rainbow of Crayola colors, is also Iceland's most treacherous. A volcanic eruption in 1973 buried half of the fishing village under 250 million square meters of molten lava and ash, forcing the whole town to evacuate and then return years later to rebuild. Rough seas around the island routinely sink cod and herring boats. And the island's weather, where winds of up to 170 miles per hour are not unusual, is considered the worst in the island nation.

Whatever your take on the folks working to free Keiko, you can't knock their dedication. The 16 international staffers rotate into this hurricane-prone freezer on seven-week assignments without a day off, starting early in the morning to prep the 140 pounds of fish that comprise Keiko's food rewards and often ending more than 12 hours later. They're a colorful bunch, too, that includes a group of former SeaWorld animal housebreakers; Steve Sinelli, a retired high-tech executive from Oregon; Smari Hardarsson, the 1998 Mister Iceland; and Keiko's vet consultant, Lanny Cornell, the former SeaWorld chief zoologist who was fired after a series of bloody run-ins between humans and captive orcas. Cornell currently advises the Las Vegas Mirage casino on its pet dolphins and recently helped Marineland of Canada acquire new belugas from the Russian military.

"It's not as easy as it looks," says Sinelli, who signed on as a 50-day volunteer and ended up staying for three years. "My wife only gets me half of the year. I don't think any of us expected to be here so long. It does get lonely. But the payoff is in trying to accomplish something that everyone says can't be done. Regardless of the outcome, I don't feel there's any failure."

If it isn't all smooth sailing for his entourage, so far Heimaey has been good to Keiko. He's in the most natural environment since his capture. Instead of being restricted to a man-made tank, Keiko's confined to a bay the aggregate size of 20 soccer fields. Instead of watching action videos and groups of children through aquarium glass, he can observe schools of fish that swim through his pen, along with the gulls and puffins that swoop down from the cliffs overhead. He's no longer part of an hourly dolphin show presented on hot summer days before audiences of hundreds of screaming and applauding fans. No wonder, even though he's probably still a virgin, he seems in no hurry to leave his halfway house.



	the Ocean Futures team of Charles Vinick, Jeff Foster, and Steve Sinelli take Keiko out for a "walk"

On the other hand, some basic facts of his captive routine remain the same: Humans plan and run his daily regimen. Using the fish-reward method employed by theme parks to train marine mammals, their protocol is to tutor the tame animal in wild orca practices in the hope that he'll eventually pass for a feral whale. So Keiko is still singing for his supper, only the show tricks-- behaviors," in the performing-orca biz--have been rebranded "aerobics." Foster tells me that the team works the whale out with "18 to 35 exercise sessions a day in winter, up to 50 sessions per day as the days get longer," with the goal of making him fit enough to keep up with wild whales.

Out on the Draupnir for Keiko's walk, Brian O'Neil, a hunky thirtysomething redhead who first worked with Keiko at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, unhinges a plastic mesh platform off the side of the boat and crouches down on it, signaling the orca to come alongside and follow the craft as it kicks into higher gear. O'Neil points the yellow Styrofoam end of a black target pole above the point in the water where he wants Keiko's head. With the target pole, he commands the whale to swim parallel to the boat; then he indicates for him to hang out astern, in the motor's foamy wake. The idea is to encourage Keiko to approach the pace and endurance levels of wild whales, which swim in short bursts of up to about 35 miles per hour but usually cruise more slowly, covering up to 100 miles per day. As we circle the bay, the Draupnir is going 13 miles per hour.

"Think of the bay as a track and us as coaches and him as an athlete we are training for a marathon," Foster says. "Only the marathon is the open ocean."

In Keiko, Foster may see a marathoner in training, but the picture I get is of a five-ton cocker spaniel going to obedience school. The Moby Dog impression is strengthened by O'Neil, who after every correct response rewards Keiko either by grabbing herring from a shiny stainless-steel bucket and flinging them into the bay or by tooting a silver dog whistle, called a bridge, as a secondary reinforcement. "The bridge is instant confirmation," O'Neil says. "Keiko knows it means 'good job, good boy.'" So much for curtailing the whale's need to please people.

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