It's February 2017 on a Thursday night, and Darren Grover is vacationing in the north end of New Zealand's South Island.

He's just left a pub when he gets a call from the Department of Conservation.

I just had drinks and dinner with a friend was walking home, and yes, we got the call.

People had just arrived back from Farewell Spit,

and they had put the call in that they had found many whales on the beach.

Darren is the general manager of Project Jonah, a group that rescues stranded whales.

So getting a call late one evening about whales stranded on a beach, not that unusual for him.

Even more predictable is where this stranding happened.

The Farewell Spit.

It's a stretch of coast that's notorious for strandings, especially in the summer.

I'd actually chosen to take my summer holiday two hours drive away from Farewell Spit, just on the off chance that an event might happen.

And it had, just like a couple of years before and the year before that.

The stranding two years earlier, it had been massive, by far the biggest in recent history, about 200 whales.

But this time, the estimate was twice that.

About 400, 400 Longfin pilot whales.

This was bigger than anything Darren had ever seen.

In fact, one of the biggest strandings in New Zealand's history.

A lot of the whales died before help could arrive,

but somewhere between 100 and 200 whales were still hanging on.

If Darren was going to save that many whales,

he was going to need a lot of help.

I'm Ella Fetter, and this is Atlas Obscura.

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