On the afternoon of 4 July, at around 16.30, three firefighters from the Carteret Fire Department were crossing Raritan Bay on their way home. They had spent Independence Day on a marine security detail, and the run back — between Carteret, New Jersey and Staten Island, near the mouth of the Arthur Kill — was as routine as any trip they make on the water.
Then a humpback whale came up from underneath them.
The whale broke the surface right under Marine Unit 2, breaching hard enough to tear open the hull. Water poured in. Within seconds the boat was going under, and its three-person crew went into the channel with it.
"We were doing seven or eight knots, and all of a sudden, there was this loud bang," Fire Chief Eric Wahl said. "When I opened up the engine hatch, I looked below, and, to my surprise, there was a big hole in the back wall of the boat, and seawater was pouring in at a quick pace."
Mayor Dan Reiman called the damage catastrophic. Every firefighter aboard, he said, had to abandon the boat within seconds of the strike.
Here is the part that sticks. A fire-department marine unit — a crew whose whole job is pulling people out of the water — suddenly needed pulling out itself. Help came from whoever was closest: a recreational boater who happened to be nearby, a passing jet-skier, and the Perth Amboy Fire Department Marine Unit. Between them they reached the men and got all three to shore.
No one was hurt.
The department credits that to one unglamorous thing. Every crew member was wearing a properly fitted life jacket. The boat swamped in seconds — there was no time to go looking for one.
"No matter how routine a mission may seem, every emergency response carries risks," the Carteret Fire Department & EMS Division wrote afterward, "and we are incredibly grateful that every member made it home safely."
Why a whale was there at all
Humpbacks have been coming back to the waters off New York and New Jersey over the past few years, after being all but gone for close to a century. Researchers tie the return to menhaden — the oily little baitfish that crews call bunker — schooling near shore again. Where the bunker go, the whales follow, and lately that has meant the busy harbor approaches around Raritan Bay.
A vessel near the scene reported whales breaching both before and after the strike, which fits the picture. These are surface feeders, lunging up through bait balls with no warning to anything floating above them.
Officials called it an exceptionally rare accident: a feeding whale and a moving boat landing in the same few feet of water in the same instant, nothing more. The whales have not turned aggressive.
It still makes a point worth repeating. NOAA Fisheries asks boaters to keep well clear of large whales — the federal guidance is roughly 100 yards — to slow down where they feed, and never to sit a small boat directly over one. An adult humpback rising for a breath can hit a hull from below before anyone on deck sees it coming.
