20 help in dolphin rescue
Published: May 16, 2006
MORE than 20 people took part in a five-hour rescue to save a dolphin washed up on a beach in Cumbria last night.
Just a short time earlier the Ministry of Defence, along with coastguards, had carried out a controlled explosion of 14 live shells which had washed up at Beckfoot, between Silloth and Maryport.
Maryport coastguards led the dolphin rescue supported by members of the British Divers Marine Life Rescue, Silloth RNLI and vets from Millcrofts practice at Cockermouth.
The alarm had been raised by a walker who knocked on the door of Margaret Studholme, the mother of Silloth RNLI operations manager Eddie Studholme.
He said: “The dolphin was stranded near the high water mark a couple of miles south of Silloth.”
“The man who found him was local to Silloth. He was near my mother’s house and asked to use the phone. She rang me instead because she knows we work on these things.”
The rescue ended at 1am after the team managed to use a JCB to dig a dam around the mammal and then use a sledge to take it waist-deep into the Solway Firth.
The male dolphin was not Marra, which hit the national headlines earlier this year after his dramatic rescue from Maryport marina.
Maryport coastguard Bob Beck said: “We had a long day yesterday. My colleague Tracy Routledge and I had been in Liverpool before we got the call around 2pm to say the pre-World War Two shells had been found at Beckfoot.
“The bombs had been found by fishermen and a controlled explosion was carried out at around 7.45pm. They were found by fisherman. The dolphin was found two miles up the coast.
“We had a team who kept on dampening him down while the work was going on around him. We took the option to carry him around 200 metres out across the sand and into the incoming tide.
“It definitely wasn’t Marra, because this dolphin was smaller.”
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