|
jeanne
|
 |
« on: 02-Oct-10, 03:54:55 PM » |
|
From the reader's digest (also found in the san francisco chronicle)
Print | Close X
Whale of a Rescue
A 50-ton humpback was tangled in ropes and drowning. These brave volunteers risked their lives trying to free her.
By Anita Bartholomew
From Reader's Digest
A Risky Rescue Mission
The two divers in snorkel gear dropped backward off the inflatable boat into the Pacific Ocean. Cautiously they swam toward the humpback lying weak and exhausted in the waves. The water was 53 degrees, dark and frothy like the foam on a beer. They could barely tell the animal's head from its tail.
A huge flipper, eight or nine feet long -- the whale's left pectoral fin -- rose up a yard away. One slap could kill a man.
Thick nylon crab ropes, called blue steel because of their strength, wound around the fin, through the whale's mouth and over its head. In some spots the lines sliced so deeply they disappeared into the animal's flesh.
Left like this, the whale would die.
Professional dive master James Moskito spent about as much time in the water as he did on land. Still boyish-looking at 40, he now worked for a company that took people on shark adventures, up close and personal. From mid-September to mid-November, he led divers enclosed in steel cages down into the hunting grounds of great white sharks off the Farallon Islands, some 30 miles outside San Francisco Bay.
This Sunday in mid-December 2005, he and his girlfriend, Holly Drouillard, were planning something a little more mellow: a trip to his parents' home.
Before hitting the freeway, Moskito checked his voice mail and found a message from Mick Menigoz, the skipper of a charter fishing boat. A whale was trapped in crab lines and floundering at sea. Menigoz was putting together a group of divers to assist volunteers from the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito. Would Moskito come with them?
"I'm in," Moskito said.
During his 26 years in the Air Force, Tim Young had parachuted out of helicopters and huge, four-engine C-130 airplanes -- with full scuba gear and a load of medical supplies -- to rescue people in precarious situations.
The summons from Menigoz that interrupted his family's Sunday breakfast, however, was unusual even for Young. Without hesitation, he tossed his diving equipment into the car and headed for the Emeryville harbor where Menigoz's boat, Superfish, was docked.
Cutting Through the Cat's Cradle
After picking up Frances Gulland, the Marine Center's veterinarian, and two volunteers across the bay in Sausalito, Menigoz motored out through the Golden Gate. He had the center's small inflatable craft with an outboard in tow.
By about 1:30 p.m., he was close to the GPS coordinates for the whale's location and told everyone to scan the horizon.
One volunteer, Jason Russey, pointed to a plume of water rising like cold steam from the sea -- the spout of a humpback whale. "There it is," he yelled.
As they approached, they saw the domed top of a massive gray head -- about the size of a large dining-room table -- just above the water. The humpback almost seemed to be anchored in place, not swimming, not even drifting with the current. And to Menigoz's trained eye, the animal was also listing to one side. The Superfish cautiously inched forward to within 100 feet.
Four buoys the size of gallon bleach bottles floated in the water around the whale. Each buoy was connected by a rope to a 100-pound metal and mesh crab trap on the ocean floor. Four traps shouldn't weigh down a whale that size, Moskito thought. Why wasn't it moving?
He and Young climbed into the inflatable and went to check. The rubberized craft bucked in the rolling sea. As they edged closer, a sea lion swimming nearby leaped out of the water over the floundering whale as if to mark the spot.
Moskito took it as a good sign -- sea lions wouldn't swim where sharks were feeding.
Suited up, he and Young tested their snorkels, readied themselves, and then rolled backward into the sea.
Like so much scattered popcorn, small chunks of white blubber, gouged from the whale's body by the ropes, floated all around them, clouding the water. Young and Moskito made their first inspection, and then returned to the outboard to don scuba gear. They'd need air to work around -- and maybe under -- the humpback.
As Young swam back to the whale, one of the crab-trap ropes caught the sheath on his leg and snatched away the larger of his two dive knives. A glint of steel disappeared into the gloom.
Swimming downward, the two men saw the animal was a female, some 50 feet in length. Her tail was wrapped with about 20 ropes connected to a dozen or so 100-pound crab traps. That's what was anchoring her in place. The weights dragged her tail down at a 90-degree angle to her body. From the tail, the ropes wound upward around her flipper. She was hogtied -- and using every ounce of strength just to keep her blowhole above water.
Moskito's heart sank as he looked at the tangled mess. There's no way we're going to save this whale, he thought, but realizing, too, that they had to try.
Back together on the surface, the two men mapped out a game plan. They'd start with the two ropes that were more loosely wound around the pectoral fin.
Taking their dive knives back underwater, they came body to body with the whale. Young began sawing at the half-inch blue rope. Moskito used a double-bladed knife that worked like scissors.
Instead of thrashing at them with her fin, the whale stopped moving completely, resting in the swells. Even after they cut her flipper free, she remained still and calm.
Both men surfaced and swam back to the inflatable to talk with the center's crew. "I think she knows we're trying to help her," Moskito said. The team turned the outboard around and motored to the Superfish for more supplies.
Moskito dove down to tackle the spaghetti tangle around the whale's tail. And Young traced the ropes, slippery with the humpback's blubber, to her mouth. The feel of the whale's skin, as soft as a wet chamois, surprised him. Patches of barnacles and other crustaceans had attached themselves to her body; he could see scars from earlier injuries.
The blue lines ran over her head and through her mouth from side to side like a gag. She had struggled so fiercely against the ropes that they'd sliced into her flesh.
Young severed the ropes, and then tugged with all his strength to remove the pieces. It was like pulling on giant dental floss. This had to be frightening her, hurting her, he thought. But amazingly, she remained calm. Young worked methodically, acutely aware of the danger of getting an arm, leg or a piece of his gear tangled in the cat's cradle of lines that surrounded her. If the humpback should dive, she would take him down with her.
His swim fins resting lightly against her flipper for leverage, Young floated eye-to-eye with the wounded animal. In utter stillness, with that eye as large as a human fist, the whale watched him as he tackled the lines.
At the tail, Moskito sliced through the nylon bonds as quickly as he could. Each time he cut one, the humpback eased her tail into position again.
A Fantastic Moment
While Moskito and Young worked, the Marine Mammal Center's crew picked up Jason Russey and Ted Vivian, two more volunteer divers from the Superfish, and returned to the whale. They dropped into the water in snorkel gear and began the job of removing pieces of rope from the whale's mouth.
Instead of teeth, humpbacks have thick, hair-like bristles called baleen that hang from the gum and serve as a food-filtration system. Ropes had gouged their way into the whale's mouth and were tangled in the baleen.
Floating just inches from her giant maw, Russey gripped the whale's lower lip and reached inside her mouth to tug out pieces that could keep her from feeding. The huge mammal opened and closed her mouth as he tugged, but remained motionless in the water.
It had been well over an hour since the rescuers arrived on the scene when Moskito got down to the last few ropes. They were deeply embedded in the blubber of the tail, and he couldn't pry them loose. Not knowing what the animal would do, he shoved his knife in and began to cut away. "I'm almost there," he mumbled through his breathing apparatus. "Just two more. I'll be done and you'll be free."
He made the last cut and watched a buoy dangling below spiral down into the darkness. Then he surfaced and shouted out a celebratory "Whoo-hoo. She's free!" The other three men joined in the hooting and hollering.
Finally liberated, the whale did a shallow dive. Moskito turned around: "Where'd it go? Where'd it go?" he called.
The next thing he knew, she was coming up from below and straight at him. Hey, I just saved you, he thought, relief turning to fear as she rushed him.
The humpback stopped a foot from his chest. She nudged him, then turned away and swam in a circle around the divers. One by one she grazed by each of the four men.
Trying to explain the whale's behavior scientifically, Frances Gulland, the vet at the Marine Mammal Center, thinks that she probably swam in circles because her body had been kinked for so long. The divers just happened to be there while she was exercising.
But the men disagree. She swam with them for a good ten minutes. They all say, as Moskito does, that it was one of the "most fantastic moments" of their lives.
And Tim Young, who's had more than his share of adrenaline adventures, says this: "I spent 26 years in the military doing high-risk rescues. Nothing's been more gratifying than this one. Nothing."
|
