Drone footage captures grey whale rescued near Vancouver Island

CHEK
WatchA two-year-old grey whale was rescued near Brooks Peninsula Saturday after spending four days entangled in a gillnet. Dean Stoltz has more.

A two-year-old grey whale was rescued near Brooks Peninsula Saturday after spending four days entangled in a gillnet.

“It was kind of in a mass of ropes and mesh entangled around its tail and trailing behind it,” said DFO Marine Mammal Response Coordinator Paul Cottrell.

The entangled whale was reported to DFO late Tuesday night by the fishermen whose net the whale got entangled in near Yuquot, but when Cottrell and his team arrived Wednesday the whale was gone.

It was spotted again Thursday north of Esperanza Inlet where a satellite tracking device was attached to the gear.

They were able to work on freeing some of the ropes that day but had to abandon the task when it became too dark.

The whale then headed too far out to sea to work on it Friday, but fortunately, it returned to the shore to feed near Brooks Peninsula on Saturday which is where Cottrell went to work, spending several hours freeing the whale.

His team used a drone to look at the animal from directly above it, which according to Cottrell, helps a great deal compared to having to put a Go-Pro camera in the water near the whale to check the ropes around a whale.

“I was able to cut the three wraps around the tailstock and then worked on the left fluke and cut all of the cork line lead lines and it was just the meshes that were left,” he said.

The drone captured the moment the whale sensed freedom.

“The animal basically sensed when I cut the last lead line on that left fluke and there was a release and it just the mesh left, so he kind of twisted out of it and swam off,” said Cottrell.

The team has a success rate of disentangling whales of roughly 95 per cent and the feeling never gets old.

“To see that animal swim off with all that energy, to see that it was gear-free was just amazing and the team was so happy about that,” Cottrell added.

Cottrell and the team believe the grey whale would have died a slow death without being rescued.

They say the two-year-old is important because it’s believed to be part of a small sub-group of grey whales — currently being studied — that stays around the west coast instead of migrating to Alaska.

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Dean StoltzDean Stoltz

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