May 24, 2014 — After a morning spent whale watching in Monterey Bay, the passengers on the Point Sur Clipper on April 27 didn't notice anything amiss when they first spotted the humpback.
But unlike the other whales, the 25-foot-long young adult stuck near the surface — and it didn't dive down to feast on the blooms of krill that attract humpbacks to the bay. "It wouldn't fluke up," said Nancy Black, a marine biologist on board the ship that day, referring to the picture-perfect tail flip that humpbacks display before diving to feed. Looking closer, the passenger on the Point Sur also noticed several buoys were strangely close to the whale, trailing behind it.
Black called the U.S. Coast Guard, which soon discovered that the whale was ensnared in a crab pot line. That led to a weekslong rescue effort involving federal and state agencies, six nonprofits, several businesses and dozens of volunteers, who battled rough seas from Monterey to Santa Barbara to free the humpback and give it a shot at survival.
Such large-scale whale rescues are likely to become more common as the population of humpbacks and other whales continues to climb along the California coast, after being suppressed by centuries of whaling. The humpbacks swim north during the spring and summer to feed, clashing with the end of crab season, which in Monterey Bay extends into July.
Most crab pots are removed from the water in the winter, after the largest crabs are taken, said Pete Kalvass, a senior marine biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. So in the past, he said, whales rarely tangled with crab fishing gear. But in the last month, four entangled whales were reported off the West Coast. Two were freed, including a humpback let loose May 6 off the Oregon coast. Crews were unable to attach satellite telemetry tags to two others, and they have not been spotted again.
Once snagged, it wasn't easy to free the whale, the rescuers said as they recounted the adventure.
After Black called the Coast Guard shortly after noon that Sunday, the Guard activated the Whale Entanglement Team, a trained volunteer squad affiliated with the National Marine Fisheries Service. Affectionately called WET, the squad stayed close to the whale, giving the fare-paying passengers on the Point Sur Clipper an extra-long trip.
By 3 p.m., team members had clipped a satellite tag to the gear already wrapped around the whale. Now, wherever the humpback went, they could find it. And that was key, said Pieter Folkens, team leader and marine mammal expert.
Read the full story at the San Jose Mercury News