A five-metre northern bottle-nose whale that was spied in the Thames yesterday was put onto a barge to be taken to open water this afternoon. The story had been on the news, but came a little closer to home (a few hundred metres) when the barge carrying the whale passed our place in Wapping. I took my P&S camera out & joined a very busy riverbank being buzzed by a helicopter. The last time I saw a whale was in Sydney about two years ago, when one decided to visit Bondi Beach.