Bravo Zulu

Ship’s crew saves whale
Exhausted animal weighed down by fishing gear
JENNIFER TAPLIN
The Daily News

She was stuck and injured. Good thing HMCS St. John’s was nearby.

The crew of the Halifax-based ship saved a humpback whale snagged in fishing nets on the Grand Banks near Newfoundland on Wednesday.

They got the call from a fishing boat, said Cmdr. Brian Santarpia in a phone interview yesterday.

"We went and had a look and, sure enough, there was an orange fishing float, and attached to the fishing float was a 30-foot-long humpback whale."

They couldn’t tell the sex of the whale, but Santarpia called it a "she" yesterday. On first glance, the whale didn’t look too injured, just tired from trying to swim away from the nets, he said. Plus, they could tell there was something weighing it down.

"It could only go up far enough to get a breath of air and it was trying to go down to free itself."

They launched a boat with three sailors in it to have a look. The sailors tried to untangle the lines around the whale and winch in one of the lines. They didn’t want to pull too hard, so they launched a second boat and put a line underneath the whale between the two boats.

"It turned out there was a whole string of crab pots (underneath) … and each one of them has a 50-pound anchor attached to it."

By the time they got to dislodging the crab pots, the whale was exhausted.

"It was barely moving at all," Santarpia said. "It was pretty safe at that point, so we decided to put two divers in the water."

Meanwhile, the entire ship’s company was on the upper deck watching the drama and looking for ways to help.

"We must of had 30 people on the fo’c’sle heaving on lines," he said. "Everyone who didn’t have a part wanted to have a part.

They watched as the divers swam up behind the whale and cut the ropes.

"And she swam away," he said. "It was pretty amazing."

The divers saw minor damage to the whale from the ropes around her fin, he said. The rescue took about two hours.

The St. John’s is on a fisheries patrol right now, isn’t used to rescuing whales.

"We’ve got some young trainees on board and I turned to a young fellow beside me and it’s his first trip to sea, and I said ‘have you ever saved a whale?’ and he said ‘no.’ And I said ‘no me either.’"

St. John’s will be back home at the end of the month.

jtaplin@hfxnews.ca

Some might think why would they waste their time saving a whale, it’s only a whale? That’s not the point. The point is they were in the vicinity and heard a call for help, granted it’s not what they expected but they got the job done nonethless.