The 25-foot juvenile whale, first spotted at 9 a.m. on Saturday, July 29 off San Pedro, was re-sighted just off San Clemente at 7:30 a.m. Sunday, by Capt. Calvin Cooper, who was aboard a sportfishing charter boat operated by Dana Wharf Sportfishing and Whale Watching.
The sighting drew an immediate response from four Southern California rescue teams who launched boats from Oceanside Harbor and found the entangled whale a short while later with help of a satellite beacon attached to it on Saturday.
Justin Viezbicke, marine mammal stranding coordinator with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said most of the gear attached to the struggling whale was cut free but some line still remained trailing from the right side of its mouth.
“The prognosis is guarded,” he said. “It will depend on how it affects its ability to forage.”
The whale also has severe cuts from where the crab traps and lines dug into its back between the dorsal fin and its tail.
The rescue teams involved were from NOAA, the Pacific Marine Mammal Center in Laguna Beach, SeaWorld San Diego and Marine Animal Rescue out of Los Angeles.
Once the whale slowed, the team cut the line using a special “flying” knife, said Jim Milbury, with NOAA.
The knife is attached to a pole, with a line back to the rescue boat. Once the knife was in position, responders removed the pole and the drag of the boat on the line connected to the knife cut through the entanglement. All the line wrapped around the whale’s body then fell off to the right side and trailed out the right side of the whale’s mouth.
About 1:30 p.m., responders made a final cut to remove the trailing line from the whale, leaving only a strand of white line running from the whale’s mouth to the leading edge of its tail flukes.
“Unfortunately mouth entanglements are very difficult to remove, so the line was cut as short as possible with the expectation that the whale will shake the remnant line on its own,” Milbury said.
Just as reports of the freed whale sent joy through the marine mammal rescue community, a report of a second entangled whale off Dana Point was made. But video sent to NOAA revealed it was actually the same humpback partially freed by the rescue teams.
That whale was spotted at about 4 p.m. by Capt. Tom Southern, with Capt. Dave’s Dolphin Safari and Whale Watching.
“They got a lot off but it still has deeply embedded body wraps and the line spiraling around the front and trailing out the right side of the mouth,” Southern said.
The humpback was eight miles off Dana Point and was moving at eight knots. Southern, who is part of the Orange County Disentanglement Team, stayed with the whale for an hour on Sunday afternoon and tried to get at the line.
This weekend brought the third humpback entangled in the past three weeks, Viezbicke said. Ten humpbacks whales have been found entangled so far this year.
Last year, 71 humpback whales were found entangled off the West Coast. The whales had been caught up in traps and other fishing lines.
Of those, 66 were seen off the California coast, including 13 in Southern California.
The West Coast figure is the highest since NOAA fisheries started keeping records in 1982, and up from 62 in 2015.
