(A later and more expanded version of this story appeared Nov. 26, 2014. Click here for that one.)
At about 3:45pm Sept. 13, crew members on the Blue Ocean Whale Watch boat spotted a whale in trouble close to shore near Moss Landing. It was tangled up in spotted-prawn line and treading water on the surface.
Kate Cummings, a naturalist and one of the owners of the boat, made a fateful decision on behalf of that whale. She called her fellow Whale Entanglement Team.
The garage sale-Hawaii connection
The team goes by the acronym WET. They mobilize in boats and go out onto the water to free whales entangled in abandoned fishing gear, crab pot lines and spot-prawn trap lines. There are other such disentanglement teams across the world; the hub of their activity is in Silver Springs, Maryland. Our local team was established in 2008. But it was conceived a couple years earlier, at a garage sale.
It was in in 2006, that Peggy Stap was holding the garage sale. With her was Mary Whitney of Carmel's Fluke Foundation. Stap got a call that there was a whale entangled in the waters off Carmel. Why did she get such a call? Because she had done humpback research in Maui for 10 years, and she had started working in the Monterey Bay with the Oceanic Society, and founded the Marine Life Studies nonprofit here in Monterey County.
But she didn't know of any local resources for this kind of thing. There are strict laws under the Marine Protection Act that regulate how close people can get to whales, even for the purposes of helping them. Whitney, who worked for the Whale Trust in Hawaii, suggested Stap call Ed Lyman. He's a NOAA employee who is the Marine Mammal Response Manager with the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. He's a legendary whale researcher and, Stap says, "the disentangler of our country."
Lyman made a series of phone calls that resulted in the local NOAA office giving some of Stap and Whitney's colleagues, including local photographer and filmmaker Bob Talbot, authorization to disentangle the whale. "It wasn't done in the way we would have wanted," Stap says of that first effort.
They didn't have the most appropriate tools. The boat was bigger than those used now. Stap and Whitney saw the need for a formal team. That's when they called Pieter Folkens. A nature illustrator by training, he had segued into whale disentanglement in the 1970s.
"The National Marine Fisheries Service asked me and a few others to step up in Northern California," he says.
They worked through the National Ocean and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), partnering with Moss Landing Marine Labs, Long Marine Lab in Santa Cruz and the National Marine Sanctuaries. It took a couple of years for get the permits and grants from private donors and the Fluke Foundation. And to gather the equipment: They use rollup boats that travel easily, motors, radio antennae, telemetry buoys, knives and a trailer to pack it all into.
They held the first official training and open forum of the Whale Entanglement Team at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories on May 8, 2008. On May 9 they had their first team roster. On May 10 they got their first call about an entangled whale.
"It looked like one that would throw the gear," Stap recalls. The lines were wrapped about the barnacles under the chin. It looked like it might free itself, which sometimes happens. But not always.
The power of the ocean
That didn't happen with the whale that they got the call about this past September. By then they had a hotline for people to report entangled whales: 877-SOS-WHALE.
They need the reporting boat to stay with the whale so that they can find it. With the September incident, the boat that called it in couldn't stay with the whale the entire time it took WET members to assemble and deploy from the dock in Moss Landing. So Kate Cummings of Blue Ocean Whale Watch asked another boat, Kate Spencer's Fast Raft, to keep an eye on the whale. Spencer did just that, radioing WET over to the whale when they arrived.
The first thing the Whale Entanglement Team did on Sept. 13 when they got to the whale was assess the situation. There are scientists aboard the rescue boats and that's how they operate—get as much data as conceivable. And the time and distance that takes gets the whales acclimated to their presence. A distressed whale can headbutt their boats, capsize them with their tail, smack them with a 15-foot long dorsal fin. People have been killed being in the water with an agitated whale, Stap says.
Folkens is the rescue team leader, a founding board member of the Alaska Whale Foundation, and a whale disentangler since 1979—his first was a sea lion in Baja, Mexico, that he freed from filament wire with a pocket knife and wire cutters. He's one of three people in California who have a license to do this work by the Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program. The other members of WET work under the auspices of that permit.
In order to assess the situation on Sept. 13, team member Kathi Koontz lowered a carbon fiber pole affixed with a GoPro camera at the end below the water line so the team could see, on a monitor, the extent of the problem.
"The fins were coming out of the water. Like a front stroke. You don't see humpbacks do that," Stap says. "The entanglement was in through the mouth and twisted and pulling its head down. We assumed the animal was doing that to keep its head above water."
They took photos and video above water, pulled up about 300 feet of line trailing behind the whale, and attached a GPS telemetry buoy to part of that line. They cut away about 200 feet of that blue spot prawn line, which is made of ropes reinforced by steel cable. The spot prawn traps have numbers on them so NOAA can trace who they belong to. That's how they discovered who set the traps.
"[That] morning, a fisherman not from this area wanted to try out this area for spot prawns," Folkens says. "He had no local knowledge about the behavior of local animals. He put down 25 pots with mud anchors. He put out 900 feet of spectrum blue steel line in waters only 300 feet deep. There was a tremendous amount of rope loose in water."
The whale, feeding in the same waters, swam through a phalanx of this loose rope and got caught. Folkens deduces that the whale dragged the loose line until it became taut. One line went into its mouth, then was cinched all the way to the rear of its mouth, like a horse's bridle. The line was anchored, or grounded, to the bottom. In trying to free itself, it became more entangled.
"It would have died," he says. But he doesn't attribute malice on the part of fishermen.
"The fishermen don't want to lose their gear, and they don't want whales entangled in them," he says. "Whales feed in same area as crabs and spot prawns. Fishermen are doing a job making a living. The NOAA works with fishermen, looking at different types of gear that can avoid entanglements."
There are changes happening in the natural world that is causing a convergence, like fish coming closer to shore. The issue is exacerbated by a hopeful turn of events: the population of humpback whales is growing. They're making a comeback. That makes feeding grounds more crowded.
"Usually we have eight reports a year," Stap says. "Northern California gets 60 percent of the reports. This year we've had 15 reports—nine in Monterey Bay, Carmel, Point Pinos. Five of them since September 12. Three of them we disentangled. Two the whales threw the gear. Four were never re-sighted. If someone doesn't stand by the animal, it's hard to find."
The fishing gear can cut into the whale's skin, down to the bone. If the line is wrapped around their tails, they can lose their flukes. Their bones can be crushed by their own struggle to free themselves. It can restrict breathing and eating. If the team gets to them in time and frees them, the ocean has a way of healing wounds.
"Orange sea lice," Step say. "They help animals heal. It's a good sign. They clean out the wound. Animals in the sea have a great advantage of recovering from wounds."
If the whale isn't freed, they can die slowly—an average of six months, according to Michael Moore, a veterinarian and biologist with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The longest disentanglement of the WET crew started in in Monterey Bay and ended 17 days later in Santa Barbara.
A waning sun ends the day
On the September whale, the team cut away 200 or more feet of slack line that was trailing behind the animal. But it was getting dark. They had gotten the call at 3:45pm in the afternoon. They couldn't work in the dark. They would have to come back. So they attached a GPS telemetry buoy to the tangled fishing line so that they could come back the next day and find the whale.
One can imagine their sleep, if they got any that night, was troubled with thoughts of the September humpback out there, struggling to not drown, trapped, confused. All night. Into the morning.
Back on May 1 of this year, Stap was coming back from a researching boat trip off the Peninsula when she spotted a whale in distress. She called Fokens and got authorization to get closer and investigate.
"You could see the ribs," she says. "The line was tangled around the mouth. It listed so much to the right the dorsal fin never came out of the water. It barely cleared enough to breathe. It was one of the worst entanglements I've ever seen."
It was late in the day. Soon it would be dark. She didn't have a GPS telemetry buoy on her boat to affix to the whale. She did the next best thing and mobilized the team to try to find the whale the next day. They looked for two days until the water got too choppy. Then they looked for a third day. They didn't find it.
"No way it survived," she says. "If only we had a second buoy we might have been able to save that whale."
This Saturday, Marine Life Studies is holding a symposium, whale entanglement presentation and wine and food reception with the team at Museum of Monterey, 1-4pm, as a fundraiser to raise $6,000 to buy a GPS/Argos telemetry package, a buoy and other equipment. It's a $100 donation to attend; call 901-3833 for details or donate directly at www.WhaleEntanglementTeam.org.
The next day the knives come out
On Sept. 14, the next day, the team took three boats out of Moss Landing Harbor and, because they had attached a telemetry buoy to the line, found the September whale again.
In the Zodiac were Folkens, the rescue team leader, in a white helmet with a camera on top. In red, near the motor, pulling on the blue line, was Lincoln Shaw. In the front, Kathi Koontz. In the Marine Life Studies' Donzi boat, WET co-founder Mary Whitney, CSUMB intern Stephanie Marcos, Peggy Stap and Connie Sanchez. In another boat were Jay Ireland, Kate Cummings and Heather Willis.
The team got to work.
The most serious entanglement is the line that had worked its way to the back of the mouth, to near the whale's eye. It was like a lasso. They attempted to cut the line with a knife affixed to a pole. But that was too risky.
"A big animal like that, seeing a sharp object around its eye, a boat bouncing up and down," Folkens says. "It could [capsize] us. Its head it 12 feet. Our boat is 15 feet. Also, we ran the risk of cutting the animal rather than the line."
So they resorted to a technique that Folkens initiated. They would use their own rope as their aid.
They strung about 200 feet of rope between two boats. They attached a three-pronged trident cutting grapple in the middle. It was weighted down like a fishing lure. Then they motored the line underneath the whale, a boat on each side. The trident, they figured, would meet the blue steel anchor line that had hitched the whale's mouth.
"We had attached three fairly large buoys to the line that went with the tangling line on spot prawn traps," Folken says. "The idea was that if we cut the grounding line, the flotation lines would pull the remaining line through the mouth of the whale like dental floss."
And that's what happened. Not all at once, though.
"Once we engaged that line," Folken says, "one of the boats pulled on that line until the cutting blade snapped onto it."
The whale "slapped" at the trident with its tail, and and sent it sailing in the air.
"It released all those pots that was weighing the animal down," Clap says.
So they had freed the line from the anchor of the sea floor, but it was still gouged into the back of the whale's mouth. And the whale was already swimming away.
"It was dragging the line," Folken says. "It didn't pull out of the mouth all the way. We had to let it be."
But they had the green GPS telemetry equipment and buoy, and orange floating poly balls attached to that line. The whale was taking them with it. It helps slow the whales down, a technique whalers employed, using barrels, to hunt them long ago.
In the following days and weeks, Folken kept his colleagues apprised of the movement of the buoy. It went 40 miles offshore. It went beyond the Farrallon Islands. It went to Bodega Bay and Point Pinos. It was traveling. The whale, seemingly, hadn't freed the line from its mouth yet. But it was swimming. Or maybe it was currents carrying a whale-free line and buoys. Or maybe the whale's lifeless body, hampered from feeding because of the line, was being carried by the current. There was one way to find out.
When they got a ping from the buoys that it was in at Pillar Point, they went out to where the signal was coming from. The Coast Guard helped them.
"We found all of the flotation buoys and 375 feet of the blue steel line and no whale attached," Folkens says. The whale swimming against the drag of the floating lines had pulled the rope free. "It worked."
That green telemetry buoy that the September whale left behind is off Point Sur, drifting and signaling. The Whale Entanglement Team hopes to be able to retrieve it at some point.
Stap, who's originally from Michigan and didn't see her first whale until she was 41 (she's 60 now), is confident in her recall and exacting with her words, until she tries to describe the feeling of freeing a big whale.
"Oh my gosh. There aren't words to describe it," she says. "You're so thrilled to see that animal go off and travel and feed. It makes your heart sing. You're thrilled, exhausted. It's not easy—the high seas and long hours. You're just…there aren't words. It's an incredible feeling. I love humpbacks."
Do the whales know that the strange people floating in the water, with their small boats and peeking cameras and knives and ropes and bouys, are there to help them?
"You hope so," Stap says.
But the reward, one can imagine, comes from the sight of a whale, finally swimming out for open waters to simply live out the rest of its miraculous life, free from the entanglements of humans.