August 4, 2023 — In the wheelhouse of a crab boat named Heidi Sue, Mike Pettis watched the gray whale surface and shoot water through its blowhole.
Tangled around its tail was a polypropylene rope used to pull up crab traps. It took two men with serrated knives 40 minutes to free the whale, which swam away with a small piece of rope still embedded in its skin. That was in 2004, off the waters of Waldport, Oregon.
Pettis, a crab fisherman, said it’s the only time in his 44 years of fishing he has ever seen a whale caught in crab lines, and he believes that is proof such encounters are “extremely rare.”
Pettis is among a number of veteran crabbers who fear regulators are on the cusp of curtailing the lucrative industry with overregulation to protect whales.
Humpbacks, which migrate off Oregon’s coast, and other whales can get caught in the vertical ropes connected to the heavy traps and drag them around for months, leaving the mammals injured, starved or so exhausted that they can drown.