Last week, a 75-foot dead fin whale was towed from a beach Point Loma. It appears the whale couldn’t get enough of San Diego’s sun and sand, because officials report another sighting, this time near Border Field State Park. Based on the whale’s physiology and state of decay, officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) believe it to be the same specimen.

“It’s beautiful, it’s very big,” said beach goer Masako Hikida. “The nature of the whale, I’ve never seen it in my life … so big.”

Other visitors weren’t so fond of the carcass, plugging their noses as they walked by.

The whale’s return likely has much to do with the strong currents that run along California’s coast. When being towed out to sea Friday by a vessel on behalf of the Marine Conservation Science Institute, the line snapped about 14 miles off the coast of San Diego. Other obligations caused the Marine Conservation Science Institute to abandon the mission, and 14 miles apparently wasn’t far enough for the carcass to escape the ocean currents.

“The current during that time was going straight back to San Diego,” said Michael Domeier, president of the institute. “It kept wanting to get sucked back to the shore. When we left the whale, it was moving to the south and it did end up going pretty far south.”

The institute had high hopes for the whale carcass – they intended to use it as bait for white sharks, but a legal technicality forced them to end their research.

The whale’s size makes disposing of it a second time a bit of a problem. The options appear to be either letting the whale rot on its own (to the chagrin of beach goers), or burial.

“We are in conversations with the (Border Field) manager as to what to do next,” said Susan Chivers, a research biologist with NOAA. “They asked me what would be the best thing to do. I said the only sure way for a whale not come back is to either bury it, or just let it rot in place. … In an urban environment, that basically means taking it to a landfill,” she said.