Daring rescue of whale off Farallones
On the front page of today’s San Francisco Chronicle, the amazing story (by the excellent Peter Fimrite) of a brave humanitarian act.
A humpback whale was discovered by fishermen trapped in a tangle of crab pot lines and struggling for her life. A rescue party cut her loose – and the whale, obviously understanding what they were doing, held still while they worked and then made what appear to be several gestures of gratitude.
At least 12 crab traps, weighing 90 pounds each, hung off the whale, the divers said. The combined weight was pulling the whale downward, forcing it to struggle mightily to keep its blow-hole out of the water…. Moskito and three other divers spent about an hour cutting the ropes with a special curved knife. The whale floated passively in the water the whole time, he said, giving off a strange kind of vibration.
“When I was cutting the line going through the mouth, its eye was there winking at me, watching me,” Moskito said. “It was an epic moment of my life.”
“It felt to me like it was thanking us, knowing that it was free and that we had helped it,” James Moskito, one of the rescue divers, said Tuesday. “It stopped about a foot away from me, pushed me around a little bit and had some fun.”