The combined efforts of a lobsterman from Grand Manan, whale rescue personnel from Campobello and Cape Cod, and a crew from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) freed a young humpback whale from entanglement in a lobster trawl on Wednesday, December 19, near Gannet Rock off Grand Manan.

Ritchie Wilson, a lobsterman working from Grand Manan, had gone out to pull his traps on December 18. "We saw a rope leading away from the second trawl and looked over and saw the whale blowing. We knew the whale was hooked in the trawl when we saw the balloon right by the whale." Wilson said it "freaked me out when we first saw him. I knew we probably couldn't do anything to help him." He adds, "I worried about him all night. I didn't want anything to happen, didn't want to go out and find him drowned."

Wilson "did everything right," according to Mackie Greene of the Campobello Whale Rescue Team. "He reported it to DFO right away." Greene praised the fisherman for going "above and beyond. He didn't want to see this whale die." After the report of the trapped whale on December 18, Greene and DFO made plans to attempt a rescue the next day. The Campobello team's boat had already been hauled out for the season, so a 10-metre DFO vessel, crewed by fishery officers Joe Greenlaw and Cameron Ingersoll, picked up Greene and biologist Scott Landry, who had flown in to help from the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies in Massachusetts, and set out for Gannet Rock.

The whale had managed to swim only about a mile since the previous day and was easy for the rescuers to locate. The humpback, originally entangled in a trawl of lobster pots, had wrapped yet another line around itself by the time the rescuers arrived. "In the morning, when we saw him blow," said Wilson, "we were pretty happy to find him alive."

Greene notes, "He was easy to approach, but he had a tremendous amount of gear wrapped around him, so tight that we could not get our cutters under it. We broke half a dozen cutting tools and lost three sets of poles, but after about 40 cuts, we had him free."

Greene explains that the whale was essentially "anchored to the bottom" by the gear, with just enough rope to surface and breathe at high tide. "Once we got the first cut, he seemed to calm down and stayed right on the surface most of the time. Joe Greenlaw did a terrific job driving the boat, keeping us right where we needed to be."

It appeared to Landry that, once the whale was freed, it had not suffered any serious injuries during the entanglement. The whale was young, estimated at three to five years old, and 40 feet in length. Most humpbacks go south for winter to breed, but some juveniles, too young to breed, remain in the Bay of Fundy through the winter.

Bob Bowman, a founder of the Atlantic Large Whale Disentanglement Network, an umbrella group spanning the entire Atlantic seaboard, says that the rescue was a good example of "everyone working together to make this venture a success." He had high praise for the fisherman and marveled at the "incredible weather for this time of year. Ultimately it is the weather that typically makes or breaks a team's ability to respond to an entanglement. In this case, as unlikely as it was for a period of workable weather to appear in late December in the Bay of Fundy C especially this December with its unusually cold temperatures and high winds and seas C the timing of the weather was perfect for the success of this disentanglement attempt."

Mackie Greene, captain of the Island Cruises whale-watch boat and a long-time member of the Campobello Whale Rescue Team, says he hopes this event will "help encourage a good working relationship in the future, between fishermen alerting authorities, working with the whale rescue team. This is the fisherman trying to do the right thing." He hopes that Wilson can be reimbursed for the cost of all his lost gear, which is estimated at over $1,500. "I'm going to see what I can do to make that happen," Greene says.

Lobsterman Ritchie Wilson says that he is glad the whale survived. "Once we saw him, I only did what anybody would do," he says.

Bob Bowman observes, "The success of the event on December 18-19 hinged on numerous parts that all came together at the same time as a very brief window of opportune weather. This all started with the fisherman who called in the report, which was relayed to officials at DFO and the disentanglement network by the Grand Manan Fishermen's Association and the Grand Manan Whale and Seabird Research Station. A rather complex and even unlikely logistical plan was then hatched and executed through the collaboration of the Campobello Whale Rescue Team, Marine Wildlife Associates, Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies, Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and the fisherman himself.