Imagine one of the last remaining right whales in the Bay of Fundy – both its head and body trapped and twisted-up in loop after loop of thin sharp polyblend fishing line cutting into its skin.
This was the scene near in the waters near Campobello Island last Saturday, when one of the last remaining endangered right whales was cut loose by two New Brunswick fishermen following a chase that lasted five hours before the whale was freed.
“It was severely entangled,” Moira Brown, senior scientist at the Canadian Whale Institute on Campobello Island and New England Aquarium whale researcher, in an interview with the Telegraph Journal on Monday.
It all started when a Grand Manan Whale and Seabird Research Station (GMWSRS) boat spotted the six-year-old male — officially right whale #4057 but now named after the late United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt — entangled in a huge amount of fishing gear.
They knew they couldn’t rescue the endangered whale alone, so they then called in in a nearby New England Aquarium boat that carried right whale researchers as well as any nearby members of the Campobello Whale rescue team.
As soon as they heard the call, lobstermen and scallopers Joe Howlett and Mac Green of the volunteer Campobello Whale Rescue Team left their work and travelled 50 kilometres to join Brown and retired Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans manager Jerry Conway on board the 24-foot inflatable rescue boat that followed the frightened whale.
To track the creature while it dove during their rescue, the Campobello team attached a long control line with a buoy at its end and for the next five-hours, the rescue teams trailed the wounded whale as bobbed below the water’s surface in an attempt to flee its would-be-saviors. Each time it breached the surface, they carefully cut at the whale’s restraints before letting the animal dip back beneath the surface.
While Brown and Conway stood by in a support vessel, Brown said the Campobello Whale Rescue Team volunteers and local Fisherman Howlett and Green “were the ones actually cutting the whale free and steering the boat.”
Read the full story here.
See more fabulous photos of the rescue here.