Coming up, a daring Humpback whale rescue mission in Mexico!
Welcome to Jonathan Bird’s Blue World!
Humpback whales are among the largest animals on Earth.
They roam all the oceans, making massive migrations between warm, tropical water where they give
birth to their young, and colder waters where they feed on more abundant food like small
fish and krill.
But while the Humpback is a mighty creature, it is not invincible.
Humpbacks are regularly injured and killed due to human causes such as pollution, ship
strikes and the most deadly: fishing gear entanglement.
It’s September, 2017.
The Blue World team is boarding the live-aboard dive boat Sea Escape in Ensenada, Mexico for
an adventure filming Great White sharks at Guadalupe Island, 150 miles offshore.
We depart and begin a 12 hour run to the island.
Within a few hours, divers Kitty Edwards and Jamie Mathison have spotted something unusual.
So we were up on the top deck talking about marine debris and ocean conservation, and
looking for whales.
And all the sudden I look out and I see an orange buoy.
I saw a splash around it and some gray, it looked like it could have been a whale.
Told the rest of the group and we looked out at it for a minute, and low and behold it
actually was a whale that was entangled in some marine debris.
To get a closer look, I run to the top deck with my camera.
Zooming in, I can clearly see a whale pulling a buoy.
Looks like he is dragging a longline or something with a buoy and there’s a bunch of kelp
on it.
Has he come up to breathe?
Yeah.
To get a better view of the situation, we launch our drone.
Don’t lose it, don’t lose it!
From a high vantage point, we can see that the whale is dragging a lot of rope, two buoys
and a bunch of kelp that has been snared on the buoy.
There is no way this whale will be able to feed dragging this much stuff.
It will surely die a slow death of starvation.
Our divemaster Benjamin Fernandez Olivari has a daring plan.
He calls another nearby dive boat, the Solmar V, for assistance, and they send over some
of their crew in a small fast boat, called a panga.
They pick up Benjamin and two other crew members, and set out for the whale.
When they get close, Benjamin jumps into the water with a knife to cut the rope.
The whale doesn’t understand what is happening and speeds up.
Things are quickly getting dangerous.
It was a little bit scary man to be honest with you because at first I started climbing
on the line and she got scared, she started pulling on me.
Like a Nantucket Sleigh Ride from the whaling days, Benjamin is hanging on while the whale
pulls him through the water.
I was holding on to the line of the buoy and as the whale pulls forward, what happens is
that you get taken underneath the surface.
So I really couldn’t breathe many times, so I said OK, now I have to pull down the
line and go all the way down to cut it because if I just hold on to this, what’s going
to happen is that I’m not going to be able to breathe.
So if I can’t breathe I’ll have to let go.
So I rode it for a while like that until I noticed that there was nothing I could do
because her tail was right underneath me.
So I didn’t want to be in the way of the tail if she got scared.
This is dangerous.
She dragged me for a while until I noticed that she was not going to stop and I was not
going to reach the place I had to, so I let it go.
We just decided to follow the whale side by side with the panga for a while so we could
see if she was going to let us do it, if she was not going to let us do it, see what’s
what, you know?
When you are in the water with an animal that size, in a panga, with a bunch of people,
you need to be careful, you know, we don’t want to hurt anybody.
The fact of the matter is that people have been killed attempting to rescue whales from
entanglement.
These animals are huge and powerful, and do not always understand what is happening.
But in spite of the danger and frustration, the team tries again.
And soon, they succeed in cutting the rope, freeing the whale from the buoys and kelp
slowing it down.
I’ve seen this on-line a million times.
And I always think, what would I do if I got caught in a situation like that?
You never know man, because everybody always says “oh I would have done that, I wouldn’t
have done this” and you never know what you are going to do until you get put into
a situation like that, in a limit situation.
So, gladly everything went well man, and we reacted the way we were supposed to.
With the whale safe and free, the crew of the Solmar V return to their boat as heroes.
And this marine debris will never endanger another whale.
We’re a few hours late arriving at Guadalupe to dive with the sharks, but everyone on our
boat agrees that it was for a great cause, saving the life of a Humpback whale.