“A military truck moving through Oak Harbor and down the highway to Coupeville turned a lot of heads Friday afternoon. After all, it’s not every day that you see the entire glowing-white skeleton of a 30-foot gray whale moving slowly through town, lashed to a flatbed.But now Rosie is finally home. After nearly two years and well over 3,000 hours of volunteer labor, the skeleton of a whale that washed up in Greenbank in December of 1998 was hauled to the Coupeville Wharf, where it will be on permanent display.Members of the Washington State University/ Island County Beach Watchers, Navy biologist Matt Klope and Navy SeaBees had to put a lot of effort into hefting the giant-sized bones on and off the truck, then hoisting them to the ceiling of the wharf building. The crew worked into the night Friday.Once the bones are assembled 16 feet off the ground, the Beach Watchers are going to create an educational display around it. They recently got a $3,000 grant from the town of Coupeville to build the display.The Coupeville Port District also spent $15,000 putting in a new support structure to hold the whale bones for years to come, along with a new paint job and lighting.Susan Berta, the former director of the Beach Watchers, was there to watch the bones rise up. She organized the Beach Watchers and other volunteers to do the whale of a project after the animal was found Dec. 8, 1998. National Marine Fisheries gave the whale remains to the group, but getting it off the beach turned out to be a nasty, difficult business.It’s good that we are so stupid and enthusiastic, she said.Gerry Smith, another Beach Watcher, remembers having to cut away at the incredibly tough rotting flesh with small filet knives in the cold and rain, with the tide coming in around his ankles. The biggest problem was that you couldn’t keep the knives sharp, he said. The tendons were like cutting airplane cables.The nearest a car could get to the corpse was about a mile down the rocky beach, so every whale bone had to be carried all that way. Smith said they loaded the prehistoric-looking head and the flippers into boats and floated them down the beach. Penny Bowen, another Beach Watcher, remembers the smell of the rotting whale flesh. I had nightmares about the smell, she said. I got nauseous just thinking about it. … The smell was mindboggling.The bones were dried in the sun for a while, then Klope and the Beach Watchers sunk them into the water at the Seaplane Base dock. The crabs and starfish finished cleaning up all the flesh off the bones. After the bones were pulled out, the tedious work began. In the basement of a Navy building, the Beach Watchers, Klope and other volunteers have been meeting each week for over a year to clean and sand each bone, then paint each one with a sealant made from Elmer’s glue and paint.The unique thing about Rosie is that her fragile baleen – the filter plate in her mouth – is intact and inside the skull where it belongs. Klope said he thinks it’s the only skeleton in the nation like that.In life, Rosie was about 33 feet, but her skeleton spans only 29 feet and six inches.Rosie was one of the 25 whales that washed up on Puget Sound beaches during the winter of 1998 and 1999, alarming environmentalist and whale lovers. The National Marine Fisheries scientists looked at and analyzed all the whales. According to the agency’s report on Rosie, she was very thin, with only three inches of blubber when she died. As an immature female, she should have weighed seven tons, but was probably down to five. They didn’t find a dangerous level of pollutants in her fat, but she tested higher than the other dead whales that year in PCBs and DDT.It’s safe to say, the report concludes, that Rosie died from malnutrition. “