Mario Rivera, Ric Brenden, Les Schnick and Stefanie Worwag pose for a photo beside the skull of "Gunther" the gray whale.

Leader photo by Nick Twietmeyer

The flipper bones of a gray whale displayed on a table at the home of Mario Rivera and Stefanie Worwag

Leader photo by Nick Twietmeyer

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For some folks it’s restoring old cars, for others, it’s gardening, cooking or collecting stamps.

Not for Mario Rivera and Stefanie Worwag. No, these two prefer to spend their free time these days cleaning, painting and re-assembling the bones of a deceased gray whale they have named Gunther.

When they heard of a dead whale washed ashore near Olele Point last summer, the pair volunteered their waterfront property as a site for the whale to decompose. Worwag and Rivera work as volunteers for the Marine Mammal Stranding Network through the Port Townsend Marine Science Center. As a veterinarian, Worwag received the call when the whale was first found, to conduct a necropsy in order to determine the whale’s cause of death. 

“We got there and there’s a friggin’ 40-foot gray whale,” Rivera recalled. “Nobody wanted it, they all wanted it off their property.”

The couple watched as the responders struggled to find a place to take the carcass to let nature take its course.

“They were calling around trying to find someone who could take it, they even called the state park ... but nobody would take it,” Rivera said. “We just looked at each other and we said, ‘Hey, take it to our beach.’”

And with that, the responders towed the carcass to the couple’s residence — which sports a high bluff and a wide berth between neighbors, allowing for ample space for the whale to decompose without offending too many passersby.

The whale was secured in place and left to do its thing. And do its thing, it most certainly did.

These days there’s no discernible smell coming from what remains of Gunther’s remains, and now with the skeleton de-fleshed, Worwag and Rivera have set to the painstaking task of painting, re-assembling and ultimately mounting the bones for display in their yard.    

On the deck of their home overlooking the water, Worwag raises one of the whale’s massive thoracic vertebra.

“I had to set them up and see how do they fit? What’s the most likely possibility for how they go together?” Worwag said, setting down the hefty bit of bone and gesturing to 11 other, similarly massive vertebrae, arranged by size and lined up along the railing of the deck.

“We decided to paint them so they look a little more even, but they’re not degreased,” she added. “Usually the museum skeletons are degreased so they don’t smell or leak oil.”

Then, Worwag smirks as she notes that for the paint, they went with “bone white.”

Despite having little working familiarity with whales as a veterinarian, Worwag said that whales, being a mammal, are not all that different from humans after all.

“It’s amazing how similar they are,” she said, enthusiastically gesturing to the various bones laid out upon the table. “They have the same seven cervical vertebrae; you have the humerus, radius, ulna, they have shoulder blades, you have the carpi and then the digits.”

As she rattles off the similarities between human and whale anatomy, Worwag makes her way to a series of flipper bones, arranged back to their original orientation and affixed with galvanized steel and epoxy.    

“It’s amazing how such a different animal is so similar to our skeleton,” she said. “Whales have finger bones!”

But one fairly important part seems to be missing from the couple’s home: the skull.

In the workshop of renowned shipwright Les Schnick sits the crowning piece of Worwag and Rivera’s intensely unique lawn ornament to-be. Accompanying Schnick is Ric Brenden, former owner of the Port Townsend Shipwright’s Co-Op and an accomplished metalworker. Schnick and Brenden have some 30 years of experience working together in the mega-yacht industry, but now, in a slight departure from their usual fare, the two are tasked with collaborating to construct supports for the fully assembled skeleton.    

Speaking to some of the new challenges posed by working on the massive whale skull, Schnick said there were a lot of similarities and a few key differences. 

“Being that it’s a naturally grown thing, it’s not symmetrical,” Schnick said. “What’s happening on the right side is not exactly the same as the left, and in a boat you try to make it symmetrical.”

“[The skull] is very porous, so trying to figure out how to put fasteners in it has been a challenge for us,” he added. “It’s like a sponge in there.” 

Conceptually, the plan — as it stands — is to support the skeleton using a series of upright steel poles, built in stages, and the bases will be placed into concrete footings or a slab.

As for a timeline on when Gunther could be finished, Schnick said there wasn’t one. Rivera said he hoped to see the project finished sometime in the next two years.

But as Schnick jokes, their work as amateur whale taxidermists might not end with Gunther.   

“They keep talking about a second one, but I don’t know,” Schnick said, eliciting an immediate response from both Rivera and Worwag.

“No!”