It took lifeguards all day to tow Wally, a dead humpback whale, just 11 miles out to sea. South winds brought the carcass back close to shore Monday, and it has returned despite repeated attempts to tow it out to sea. (Courtesy of Mark Girardeau and Mike Mongold, Newport Landing Whale Watching) 
 
 They’ve been blown up and cut to pieces, buried on beaches and dumped miles out at sea — but there’s still no foolproof way to get rid of a dead whale. 
 
 Witness Wally. 
 
 For the past two weeks, Los Angeles and Orange County officials have towed the 45-foot-long dead humpback out to sea — again and again and again. 
 
 But the female whale with the inappropriate name has refused her watery grave. 
 
 Since she initially washed up on Dockweiler State Beach near Los Angeles International Airport on July 1, Wally has bobbed farther and farther south, coming close to the shore off San Pedro, then Newport Beach, and later Dana Point, before most recently being towed away from San Clemente. Each time, lifeguards tugged Wally back out to sea in the hope that she would decompose naturally away from the beach. 
 
 ‘Crazy situation’ 
 
 “This is kind of a crazy situation in that it keeps coming back,” said Justin Greenman, assistant stranding coordinator for California with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 
 
 Ideally, NOAA prefers to let a whale decompose on the beach, he said, but that wasn’t an option with Wally, who washed up days before the Fourth of July and about 100 yards from an RV park. 
 
 Since then, a convergence of problems have made Wally particularly difficult to dispose of, including that she had never been towed out far enough to keep winds and currents from drawing her bloated body back to the shore, Greenman said. 
 
 Before Wally was dragged out the first time, NOAA put together a float model, taking into account currents and winds to determine how far offshore the whale needed to be deposited to keep her from making a second shoreline appearance, Greenman said. 
 
 According to the NOAA model, Wally should have been towed about 30 miles offshore, he said. 
 
 Not enough fuel 
 
 Instead, she was tugged roughly 15 miles off the beach at Dockweiler, said county lifeguard Capt. Kenichi Haskett. It came down to the simple fact that none of the county lifeguard vessels were large enough to tow the whale the full 30 miles and retain enough fuel to make the return journey, Haskett said. 
 
 Not surprisingly, the challenge of disposing of a dead cetacean is its size. That was the problem for the Los Angeles County lifeguards who towed the 35- to 40-ton whale from her initial landing spot at Dockweiler after they waited for high tide to pull her back in the ocean, he said. 
 
 “It was something that was extremely strenuous to remove,” Haskett said. 
 
 Even the roughly 15-mile trip took the lifeguard vessel nearly five hours, he said. L.A. County lifeguards are prepared for their day-to-day work assisting vessels and making rescues, he said, but towing a whale isn’t something the agency is prepared for, he said. 
 
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 Whale like a sail 
 
 Unfortunately, scientists did not have time to perform a full necropsy of Wally. When she was pulled off the beach, the whale was still largely intact, which allowed gases to build up inside Wally and keep her floating for longer than if researchers had been able to make more cuts, Greenman said. 
 
 “Generally, when given the chance to do a full necropsy — when I get a chance to fully open (a whale) up and everything — it does not float as long,” he said. 
 
 Without an initial necropsy, the gases that built up inside Wally turned the whale into a sail, Greenman said, making it even easier for the animal’s corpse to be pushed by winds and currents back toward the shore. 
 
 “Obviously, it works better when the animal can be opened up and degassed,” he said. 
 
 Greenman added that it’s still not clear what killed Wally, but researchers have taken samples and are testing for biotoxins. Those test results should come back in about a month, he said. 
 
 Recurring problem 
 
 Generally, disposing of dead whales has posed a challenge wherever they have landed. In one instance in 1970, an Oregon town attempted to blast away a dead whale with dynamite, nearly destroying an Oldsmobile as chunks of the mammal rained down onto onlookers. 
 
 Haskett said a pyrotechnic solution was suggested to get rid of Wally’s carcass, but lifeguards chose to tow her out instead. 
 
 More recently, a dead, 40,000-pound Fin whale washed up on a Malibu beach in 2012, leading to an interagency kerfuffle as state, county and local officials tried to foist onto each other the responsibility for removing the malodorous carcass from the affluent coastal area. Eventually the corpse was towed away from the beach several days after it washed ashore. 
 
 Earlier this year, when a gray whale washed up near the popular Trestles surfing spot at San Onofre State Beach, officials opted to cut up and haul the whale away on trucks after ruling out towing it to sea or burying it. 
 
 Dead whales are fairly common, Greenman said. In the past week, he’s heard of two whale carcasses floating near the Channel Islands. What isn’t common is having one corpse floating back to shore again and again and again and again, he said. ||||| The body of a whale washed up on the beach in Encinitas and officials believe it could be the same "Wally" that floated up on Dockweiler Beach several weeks ago.Wally's body washed up on Dockweiler on June 30 and was towed out to sea by Los Angeles County lifeguards a day later.But the carcass then drifted back toward the Orange County coast more than a week later. It was towed out to sea by lifeguards there, but kept drifting back toward the shore. Orange County lifeguards had to tow the body out at least four times.Wally, later determined to be a female humpback between 10 and 20 years old, had been a star of several viral videos. In one, the sunlight catches her spout so that it looks like she is breathing out a rainbow. In another, a little girl appears to magically make her surface on command.Encinitas lifeguards believe the whale body that came ashore at Grandview Beach had been floating and decaying in the water for about two weeks. They believe it is Wally, but they have not definitively confirmed a match. They expect to remove the carcass by Sunday morning. ||||| After twice towing a dead humpback whale out to sea to keep it from coming ashore, Newport Beach lifeguards said Tuesday that the 22-ton floating carcass appears to be staying away. 
 
 On Sunday, Newport lifeguards first saw the dead whale, named Wally by biologists who had tracked it before its death. 
 
 The 45-foot-long decaying mass was less than a mile off the Newport Pier and looked like it would soon wash up on the coast, according to lifeguard Battalion Chief Mike Halphide. 
 
 In response, lifeguards sent a rescue boat to tow Wally away from the beach. 
 
 Whale carcass Courtesy of Newport Beach lifeguards The remains of Wally, a humpback whale, are pictured off the coast of Newport Beach on Sunday as lifeguards towed it further out to sea to try to keep it from coming ashore. The remains of Wally, a humpback whale, are pictured off the coast of Newport Beach on Sunday as lifeguards towed it further out to sea to try to keep it from coming ashore. (Courtesy of Newport Beach lifeguards) (Courtesy of Newport Beach lifeguards) 
 
 But even after they dragged the body 14 miles south, winds pushed it back toward the pier. 
 
 On Monday, lifeguards saw the carcass again, this time about five miles offshore. 
 
 So the boat set out again, and after five hours of towing, the crew dropped off Wally's remains about 10 miles south of the Newport Pier, Halphide said. 
 
 So far, the body hasn't returned, according to lifeguards. 
 
 "It went well enough that when I got here this morning I didn't see him," Halphide said around 11 a.m. Tuesday. "As of right now, we believe Wally is still at sea." 
 
 Wally's body first grabbed headlines June 30 when it washed up on Dockweiler State Beach in Los Angeles County. 
 
 It's unclear how the whale died, but marine biologists who examined the carcass clarified that Wally was actually a female who got her masculine name in August when she was tagged by the fisheries division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and misidentified as a male. 
 
 The day after the carcass washed ashore at Dockweiler, crews pushed it back into the ocean and two boats towed it out to where officials hoped the body would decompose naturally. 
 
 Newport Beach lifeguards are sticking to that plan, but Halphide said they'll keep an eye out in case they need to repel Wally from the city's beaches again. 
 
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 Jeremiah Dobruck, jeremiah.dobruck2@latimes.com 
 
 Twitter: @jeremiahdobruck |||||  A whale carcass found on an Encinitas beach Saturday night is likely Wally the whale, who just won't stop washing ashore. 
 
 A construction crew attempted to cut up and remove the decomposing humpback from Grandview Beach Sunday, since lifeguards didn't have a boat big enough to haul it to sea. Work was halted when part of a forklift snapped off during the effort. Encinitas Marine Safety Capt. Larry Giles said lifeguards covered it in sand to cut down the stench, and workers will try again Monday, with plans to haul it to the Miramar landfill. 
 
 “You can smell it up to about a quarter mile away,” he said. 
 
 Giles believes the dead animal is Wally, who in life was YouTube famous, and in death has plagued Southern California beaches by repeatedly drifting to shore. 
 
 "We're pretty sure of it because of the other agencies we've spoken to," he said. "Yeah, it's Wally." 
 
 The 22-ton carcass was first found on Dockweiler State Beach in Los Angeles County on June 30. Lifeguards spent days tugging the animal back to the ocean only to have it reappear again, this time further south. According to the Orange County Register, the dead whale has washed ashore and been towed out to sea at least a half dozen times by different jurisdictions. 
 
 "It took us about 3 1/2 hours to get the whale about 10 miles offshore before we detached the line in hopes that nature would take care of itself," Orange County sheriff's Lt. Mark Stichter told reporters after the dead whale appeared near Dana Point. 
 
 Wally the whale, a female who was about 15 years old, was regularly spotted in the waters off Orange County in her later years. Although she was covered in whale lice, which usually signifies poor health, she was seen eating and breaching. 
 
 Last year, photographers who caught up with Wally off the coast of Newport Beach captured footage of the whale as she came to the surface. Water expelled from her blowhole and caught the light just so, creating a rainbow. The footage was put on YouTube and has been viewed more than 1 million times.
– Wally the dead whale has apparently been washing up on beaches in southern California a lot more reliably than the swallows now return to Capistrano. The body of a dead humpback whale that turned up in Encinitas, northern San Diego County, is believed to be the same whale that has already been towed out to sea at least five times after washing up on beaches in Los Angeles and Orange Counties, ABC7 reports. Last week, the Los Angeles Times reported that the 22-ton female carcass, which first turned up on Dockweiler State Beach June 30, appeared to be staying away from the beach it hit next—Newport Beach—after being towed out to sea several times. Wally keeps coming back because officials haven't towed her far enough out to sea to avoid winds and currents bringing the 45-foot carcass back to shore, the Daily Breeze reports. Time and vessel size constraints mean Wally has been towed out around 15 miles each time when 30 miles would be more appropriate, experts say. But the saga may soon be over: The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that officials in Encinitas plan to cut up the decaying whale—which can now be smelled at least a quarter of a mile away—and dump it in a landfill. A construction crew tried to get rid of Wally on Sunday, but they gave up after part of a forklift snapped and will resume the effort on Monday, officials say. (This whale ended up covered in graffiti after washing ashore in New Jersey.)