Fort Bragg’s blue whale comes home to the Noyo Headlands

FORT BRAGG, CA., 10/19/26 — A blue whale that died off the Mendocino Coast in 2009 finally has a home.

The Noyo Center for Marine Science cut the ribbon Sunday evening on its Whale House LaBONEatory, a 2,240-square-foot building on the Noyo Headlands built to hold the whale’s skeleton while staff and volunteers put it back together. It’s the first new building on the headlands in generations, according to the Noyo Center, and the first piece of its planned Ocean Science Center campus on part of the former lumber mill site.

It was a chilly evening on the bluff. A dog in a fleece coat stood on the pavement out front. Inside, behind a velvet rope, the bones lay on the concrete floor: a long line of vertebrae, the jawbones and the skull.

“When you see it, it’s the first time any of us have seen her skeleton completely laid out with her skull,” Sheila Semans, the Noyo Center’s executive director, told the crowd before the ribbon-cutting.

Seventeen years

The whale was a 73-foot female killed by a ship’s propeller in 2009, according to the Noyo Center. She washed ashore, and the city of Fort Bragg worked with NOAA to get the rights to the skeleton for public display.

Then the community went to work. More than 200 people hauled about 70 tons of bones and blubber up a 40-foot cliff and buried the whale in compost in the woods, the Noyo Center says. Four years later, volunteers dug the bones back up. They were cleaned and scrubbed at the city’s wastewater treatment plant, and the skeleton spent years in storage, most recently in a volunteer’s garage. Earlier this month, a caravan of trucks and trailers moved the bones to the Whale House.

“This whale came up in 2009, and a whole group of community members from this community collected the bones, brought her up a 40-foot cliff and buried her out in the woods,” Semans said. “Four years later, a whole group of this community, and I’m talking students, community members, elders, tribal members, came out and helped us dig those bones up.”

The skeleton has been part of the center’s education program since. Semans invited guests to add their stories on a community timeline inside, and asked members of the Scrub Club, the volunteers who scrubbed the bones, to post their stickers as well..

“This whale, it has a special place in all of our hearts,” she said.

She singled out two staff members who have been with her since the beginning: Sarah Grimes, the center’s marine mammal stranding coordinator, and Richard Millis, who manages its field station and specimen collection.

A blessing and a red ribbon

The program opened with a Pomo blessing from Melody Williams. Fort Bragg Mayor Jason Godeke also spoke. Noyo Center board president Linda Ruffing and board secretary Donna Worster cut the ribbon, Worster with a pair of oversized ceremonial scissors.

The building isn’t finished. Semans told the crowd the center still has to complete it and get it signed off as a public building. Everything served that evening had been donated, she said, and it was all part of the fundraising. The center set an $80,000 goal for its fall fundraiser, and Sunday was billed as the public’s only chance to see the bones before the Whale House’s grand opening next year.

The plan is to degrease, repair and reassemble the skeleton in the building, then show it in a temporary viewing gallery until the Ocean Science Center’s exhibit hall is built. In 2017, the center assembled what it calls the world’s largest orca skeleton, now on display at its Discovery Center museum in downtown Fort Bragg.

“Again, we are an organization built for community,” Semans said. Putting the whale back together, she said, will take a community, and Sunday was the first step.

After the ribbon came down, an eight-piece soul band played in the cold.

More information on the Noyo Center and the Whale House is at noyocenter.org.