Video: Man jumps on whale to free it from fishing line

It took three hours for the fisherman to finally cut the mammal free.

A California fisherman is being hailed a hero for leaping onto a massive humpback whale that was tied down by ropes and set it free.
Incredible video shows the fisherman struggling to stay on the whale's back whilst holding a knife in his mouth as the giant mammal thrashed around in panic. It took three hours for the fisherman to finally cut the mammal free, the Daily Mail reports.
'We were coming in from fishing and there was a white buoy that was wrapped around the whale's tail,' Nicholas, the man who recorded Sam's rescue mission said.
Sam and his mates called the coastguard who took an hour and half to cut the buoy from the rope. However, there was still one rope tangled around the whale's back. 'That one rope was still holding him down to the ocean floor, and the whole time he was swimming in very tight counter-clockwise circles because all that rope was still attached to the bottom of the ocean,' Nicholas said.

When the coastguard said there was nothing they could do and when they did not come after two hours, the crew decided to save the whale on their own. 'That's when we decided to get Sam in the water,' Nicolas added.
It took Sam two attempts to cut the rope as the whale kept diving underwater every time. At one point the whale kicks its tail nearly crashing into the boat. Finally, in the third attempt he managed to successfully snap the rope. "Get it, get it before she dives!" Nicholas can be heard shouting in the video. 'He jumped in, was able to crawl up his back, and right then that whale fluke almost hit the phone out of my hand,' Nicholas said.
'This is going to sound super crazy but when the coastguard told us there was nothing else we could do, just let it be, I turned up the volume really loud on the VHF radio,' he added. 'I yelled at the whale and told him to listen, and no one else was coming for him, and we're his only hope, and he better lay still and let us do this or else he's going to die,' Nicholas concluded.