Dead whale towed from Oakland to Angel Island

Photo: KTVU A screenshot taken from KTVU's helicopter shows the whale with an...

A dead whale that surfaced near Howard Terminal in the Oakland Inner Harbor over the weekend was towed to Angel Island Monday to get it out of the way of the ships that pass through the busy channel, officials said.

The young female whale, believed to be either a fin or blue whale between 40 and 60 feet long, was first reported by the U.S. Coast Guard Saturday morning, said Giancarlo Rulli, a spokesman for the Marine Mammal Center, the Sausalito-based nonprofit that rescues and rehabilitates marine mammals.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers couldn’t find a pier around Howard Terminal to tie the whale to, so they lugged it to an abandoned pier at the southeastern edge of Angel Island at Point Blunt and secured it there to prevent it from floating into the shipping channel, Rulli said.

The female whale showed no obvious signs of trauma or wounds, Rulli said, but a full necropsy could take a while.

Though members of the Marine Mammal Center were able to take blubber and muscle samples as the whale floated near Howard Terminal — thanks to a boat provided by the Oakland Police Department — the next step is to get the whale up onto the beach at Angel Island for the necropsy.

And with king tides coming in following a storm that whipped through the Bay Area over the weekend, downing trees and causing flooding in some places, that won’t be an easy task, he said.

Throughout the Bay Area in 2016, the Marine Mammal Center responded to more than 30 calls for marine rescues and necropsy requests— including dolphins and other sea creatures — Rulli said.

Michael Bodley is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mbodley@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @michael_bodley