A humpback whale seen off the coast of the Baltic Sea is now trapped again in a bay. According to Mecklenburg‑Western Pomerania’s environmental minister, Till Backhaus (SPD), the animal is stuck in Kirchdorf Bay at the Poel island on Tuesday. The water depth where the whale is lodged is sufficient for it to swim free on its own, so a rescue operation carried out on the previous Friday evening could be repeated. The foundation Deutsches Meeresmuseum reported that the whale had once again freed itself from the shallow waters of the Wismar Bay on the evening before and moved toward deeper areas. However, it failed to head in the direction of the open Baltic Sea, from which it would need to travel to the North Sea and then to the Atlantic.
The whale was first spotted on March 3 in Wismar’s harbor. Over the following days it became entangled multiple times in Wismar Bay, and its condition has since deteriorated. The likelihood of a successful escape from the Baltic to the open Atlantic has been deemed very low.