Look in Sky for One That Got Away

Whale watching season has returned to San Diego, but there’s one whopper out there that no one has been able to spot no matter how hard they try.

Baby Jelley, a 12-foot-long, yellow and red, helium-filled whale that was used to attract buyers to a newly opened housing development in Escondido, broke loose from its tethers Sunday and headed skyward. The inflatable was last seen floating toward the coast.

“He’s about the size of a two-car garage and he has a beautiful 100-foot, multicolored streamer attached to him and a 150-foot rope hanging from his belly,” said Ashley Roberts, a real estate agent with the Jelley Co. and part owner of the wayward whale. “We bought him to attract attention to our new housing project in Escondido, and we really want him back.”

Roberts said Baby Jelley had been tethered for a week to the roof of a garage in the Fire Mountain Estates development in north Escondido before its escape Sunday evening. The corporate whale, which cost Roberts and a co-worker $500, was being put into the garage for the night when the tether broke, she said.

Made of a special vinyl and packed with 190 cubic feet of helium, Baby Jelley could stay aloft for as long as six days, said Ernie Pyle of Ernie Pyle Carnival Supplies, the Escondido firm that sold the whale to the Jelley Co.

“Who knows where this thing is at?” Pyle said. “The wind might have blown it anywhere.”

San Diego County was under the influence of a weak Santa Ana condition Sunday, and winds were blowing out to sea, National Weather Service forecaster Wilbur Shigehara said.

“That whale was smart enough,” he said. “It knew it was too close to the mountains so it probably did head out to sea.”

Local air traffic controllers and Federal Aviation Administration officials have not received reports of sightings of the whale.