April 17, 2006. The Southend Standard newspaper for the week ending April 7 reports that a four foot long “Dolphin” has been found stranded dead “on a Canvey Beach” six km (4 miles) south west of the Chalkwell Station stranding site noted previously. The date and exact position “near Thorney Bay Caravan Park” (formerly Thorndon Creek) are unclear. This site would normally be considered as ideal for whale watching, with the five fathom channel traversed by the “London Whale” in January situated only 0.3 to 1.0 km south of Deadman’s Point, and becoming as close as 0.15 km – 2 km to the east at the harbour once called World’s End and now Hole Haven. I have never been to Canvey Island and see these delightfully named locations opposite the Dickensian Cooling Marshes. Stranded Cetaceans, like Mute Swans, belong to Queen Elizabeth II in England, and such finds must be reported to the Natural History Museum in London for forensic investigation. If it was four foot long and not yet properly studied then perhaps it was a Harbour/Harbor Porpoise Phocoena phocoena rather than Delphinus delphis growing to twice that length. The average range of the Spring tides present the weekend before the news report increases from Southend to Gravesend as the River Thames Estuary narrows and becomes less saline (particularly when the tide is out). The narrowing occurs mainly at the stranding site where most of the narrow intertidal zone consists of mud below a narrow beach.

Weston Blake (1975 in Geografiska Annaler 57A) postulates that at the arctic locality with a summer tidal range of 3.5 m, the driftwood logs occur on a storm beach 1.5 to 2.0 m above the high tide level and large Bowhead Wales Baaena mysticetus with a body thickness of four or five metres around the low water mark. He cites a remark by V. Stefansson (1921, The Friendly Arctic MacMillan, New York 784 pp.) as the main observation about these whales.

“We know through observation of many stranded whales that their skeletons always lodge not at the upper level of wave action, as is the case with driftwood, but at the level of the low tide or even lower.”

This rule suggest that in parts of the English coast with a great tidal range even large whales will be conspicuously stranded for study and elsewhere in microtidal environments they will be eaten by fish and go generally unobserved. What mattes is not so much the length of the cetacean but the thickness of the body below the waterline and any tendency for the body to have the same density as the surrounding water. In that state of neutral buoyancy the greater density of the jaws will produce a head-down posture stranding the corpse, or at least damaging it at depths equal to the whole body length. Bowhead whales have much fat around a large jaw and overall buoyancy, but some of the smaller cetaceans like porpoises may pass through a phase of neutral buoyancy as decomposition gases develop in an initially denser body.

The Leigh and Westcliff Times for the week ending March 14 2006 reported another (or perhaps the same) Porpoise. It was stranded on the Leigh foreshore until "the tide swept the body back out to sea again."