A hopeful turn for whales stranded in Everglades Brian Sanders, a charter boat captain in Everglades National Park in Florida, was returning from a fishing expedition when he thought he saw black kayaks trying to come ashore. After moving closer, he realized the strange black forms were pilot whales - and a few had beached themselves. "They were literally trying to swim out of the water onto the beach as far up as they could possibly go," he said. Since the Tuesday discovery in a shallow, remote part of the Everglades, more than 50 stranded short-finned pilot whales - spotted first by Sanders - have captured national attention and have so far defied experts' predictions of their likely deaths. The outlook was grim Wednesday morning when a rescue team found six dead whales and four that were in such bad condition that they had to be euthanized. Blair Mase of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said biologists would be "lucky if we're able to even save a couple" of the remaining pod of approximately 41. The whales - which can weigh more than 6,000 pounds and grow to be 24 feet long - have a tight-knit social structure that aids them in the wild, but makes them susceptible to mass strandings, said CT Harry with the International Fund for Animal Welfare's Marine Mammal Rescue and Research Program. Even if the entire pod is not sick or lost, "the larger group will stay near that animal or those few animals that aren't doing so well," he said. Basically, it's just at the wrong place at the wrong time. Short-finned pilot whales, which typically travel in groups of between 25 and 50, are the most common species to mass strand in Florida, Mase said. On Wednesday, efforts to herd the whales toward deeper water failed. As rescue teams left Wednesday night, the whales were stuck 20 miles east of their habitat, in an area with hundreds of yards of sandbars and no easy way out. It was unclear how long they had been there or how long they could survive without becoming dehydrated. The dead whales had not eaten recently, Mase said. The whales appeared doomed, experts said. But good news came Thursday morning. Though one more whale was found dead, no living whales remained in the spot where they were clustered Wednesday. Eventually, 35 were spotted nine miles north in water 12 feet deep, and rescue workers fought Thursday to keep the animals from returning to shore. The five that are not accounted for could have died and sunk to the ocean floor. "We are encouraged and hopeful, but there's no guarantee they will continue to move offshore," Mase said. She said there were no physical barriers that would prevent the whales from continuing to swim away from the coast and eventually reach their habitat range of water of 1,000 feet deep. But there was also the possibility that the whales would return to shore. A team of 35 responders, made up of workers from the National Park Service, the Marine Mammal Conservancy, the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Coast Guard, collected information from the dead animals to determine what caused the stranding. They planned to resume work Friday morning. "The mood is a lot more optimistic," Mase said.