Image courtesy of Center for Coastal Studies

Provincetown’s History Told Through Artifacts

by Steve Desroches

Born in 2004, Spinnaker spent the first summer of her life off the coast of Massachusetts, frequently spotted just off Provincetown. The Provincetown-based Center for Coastal Studies maintains a Humpback Whale Studies Program cataloging and naming the mammals throughout the Gulf of Maine, the area between the Bay of Fundy to Cape Cod and out to Georges Bank. The Center for Coastal Studies names whales, who are individually identifiable in large part because their flukes are unique, much like a fingerprint. And Spinnaker was so named as her fluke featured sail-shape markings. In the locally named family tree, Spinnaker was daughter to Palette and granddaughter to Compass. Over the course of her life, Spinnaker became entangled in marine debris four times, three of which the Center for Coastal Studies Marine Animal Entanglement Response team freed her. However, a portion of an entanglement from 2014 could not be removed. 

Sadly, Spinnaker washed ashore in Acadia National Park in Maine in September of 2015, having died, it is thought from the multiple entanglements and a possible infection caused by the remaining portion of fishing gear around the lower portion her left eye. After a necropsy, Spinnaker’s skeleton went through a two-year articulation process, and in May of 2017 her reassembled remains were installed in the Ruth Hiebert Marine Laboratory at the Center for Coastal Studies at 5 Holway Avenue in Provincetown. The skeleton is still used for research purposes as well as to educate the public about humpback whales, marine pollution, and solutions as to how whales and the fishing industry can co-exist, as well as acting as an artifact of the region’s natural history. The Spinnaker Exhibit is open for viewing at the Center for Coastal Studies year-round, Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.