'Free Willy' whale remains the star of his own show

TAKNES BAY, Norway -- Keiko the "Free Willy" whale still doesn't want to be free.

It's been about a year since Keiko was freed from his pen -- and swam straight back to human companionship. With the killer whale drawing 200 to 400 fans a day, the bay he calls home seems more like a low-budget "Keikoland" than an experiment in returning a captive orca to the wild.

To keep people from entering the water, Keiko's keepers posted a 24-hour guard and put up orange ropes with "no access" signs along the shore. Temporary nets span the bay to keep small boats out.

Local farmers charge 20 kroner (about $2.70) for parking in dirt lots with official-looking Keiko signs. Other signs point down a well-worn path through the trees to the world's most famous whale.

Under the rusted, corrugated roof of a waterfront shack used by Keiko's minders, Keiko T-shirts for sale sway in the wind.

"The perfect thing for us would be to be left alone," said Thorbjorg Valdis Kristjansdottir, a marine biologist who goes by the name "Tobba" and is one of the Hollywood star's four keepers.

But that's not happening, despite the remote, rural location of Taknes Bay.

"There is always somebody trying to get down to the water," said Tobba. "People come at all hours."

Keiko's stardom came from the three "Free Willy" films, in which a young boy befriends a captive killer whale and coaxes him to jump over a sea park wall to freedom.

That launched an ongoing $20 million drive to make Keiko the first orca truly returned to nature. Tobba and her teammates are attempting to integrate Keiko into a pod of wild killer whales.

Orcas that normally pass through the area did not come this year, depriving Keiko of contact with his wild kin. But Tobba says Keiko does tail slaps and jumps called "side breaches" used by orca to stun fish, "something he learned from wild whales."

To keep Keiko in shape, his caretakers take him on "walks," leading him around the fjords from a small boat at least three times a week.

Keiko, estimated to be 26 years old, was captured near Iceland in 1979 and sold to the marine park industry. The drive to free him started 10 years ago, after he was found ailing in a Mexico City aquarium.

Keiko, which means "Lucky One" in Japanese, was rehabilitated at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, then airlifted to Iceland in 1998. His handlers there prepared him for the wild, teaching him to catch live fish in an operation that cost about $500,000 a month. That amount now pays for a year of care, Free Willy Foundation founder and president David Phillips said in an email from California.

Keiko was released from Iceland in July 2002. He swam straight for Norway on a 870-mile trek that seemed to be a search for human companionship.

Keiko first turned up near the village of Halsa in late August or early September of 2002. He allowed fans to pet and play with him, even crawl on his back, becoming such an attraction that animal protection authorities imposed a ban on approaching him.

In November, Keiko was coaxed to his new home at Taknes Bay, still in Halsa but -- handlers hoped -- farther from the crowds.

"We still get people showing up in bathing suits (wanting to swim with him)," says Tobba. Others expect a show, such as Keiko doing tricks for part of his daily ration of roughly 90 pounds of herring.

"When are the feeding times?" one visitor asked recently.

"No set times," responded Tobba for the hundredth, perhaps thousandth, time.

Keiko swam across the bay, turning on his back to reveal his white belly to the crowd, which gasps "Ooooooo."

Tobba winced at the sound, but 13-year-old Martine Vik was delighted. She wrote a seven-page school report on Keiko and orcas, and was seeing him for the first time.

"We don't go into the water to play with him. He's a big boy now," said Tobba afterward. However, because orcas are very social, they act as his family in the hopes that a real pod will someday accept him.

Skeptics have dismissed the project as hopeless, and at least one U.S. seaquarium has argued for having him returned to captivity.

Tobba says Keiko knows people are around, but seems to increasingly hide from them, a possible sign of progress.

He is already free to leave, within limits. Tobba says they brought him back in February after he vanished and turned up many kilometers (miles) away at a fish farm, something declared off-limits by Norwegian authorities.

And Keiko is still a novice at life in the wild. In February, he swam under ice for the first time, panicked and broke through, injuring his head.

"There is still a small abrasion there," said Tobba. "But he learned."