Marine-mammal rescuers on Saturday struggled to free a humpback whale entangled in fishing line off the Palos Verdes Peninsula, but will have to make another try Sunday.
Whale-watching boats rushed to get eyes on the whale when it was spotted at about 9 a.m. Saturday so a rescue team could find it quickly. The nonprofit rescue group Marine Animal Rescue tagged it with a tracking device by noon.
“It was a smaller humpback whale at the surface with a couple buoys trailing behind it,” Harbor Breeze Cruises Capt. Erik Combs said. “It was just at the surface moving very slowly.”
The two-man disentanglement team led by Marine Animal Rescue Director Peter Wallerstein was able to throw a transmitter buoy on the attached lines.
But the team wasn’t able to get the attached rope and buoys off.
“It’s wrapped real tight around its tail, and he kept diving on us,” Wallerstein said. “It was moving very slowly in Palos Verdes. Then, in San Pedro, it started really diving deep, pulling it all down and we couldn’t get to it.”
The team had to wait into the afternoon to begin trying to get it off because a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries representative had to come up from San Diego to oversee the effort.
NOAA has long relied on a close network of volunteer divers and citizen scientists to help free entangled marine animals. But the agency has been more cautious since a Canadian diver was killed while cutting fishing line off a right whale earlier this month.
The disentanglement team worked for hours to get close enough to the whale to cut off the line using a knife attached to a pole, Wallerstein said.
As the sun began to set and it became too difficult to see, the team decided to stop and resume work Sunday morning. The humpback was last seen swimming south in Long Beach.
“We’re going to see where it is and then we’re going to try to do something about it,” Wallerstein said. The transmitter he attached feeds the whale’s location to NOAA Fisheries.
“It was a long day and I’m really tired,” he said. “We definitely had to be more cautious (because of policy reviews in the wake of the Canadian diver’s death), but I’m always really cautious.”
Does he think he’ll free the whale Sunday?
“It’s a challenge, but we’ve done it before,” he said.
Humpbacks are commonly seen off of Los Angeles and Orange County feeding on small fish and plankton. Gray, blue, minke and fin whales also are regular visitors to the coast.
