The
adult animal, seen off Newport Beach, was struggling to escape a potentially
deadly situation as line was tangled in its mouth
Joanna Walters in
New York
Saturday
31 October 2015 20.18 GMTLast modified on Saturday 31 October
201520.20 GMT
Marine
experts were on Saturday trying to save a humpback whale that was struggling off the coast of California, with a
length of commercial fishing line tangled in its mouth.
Rescuers
were following the whale, trying to figure out if they could free it from the
potentially deadly hazard. The adult humpback was off the coast of Laguna
Beach, south of Los Angeles.
It
was first spotted on Friday morning off Newport Beach, a few miles north,
showing distress and swimming near the surface. A whale-watching boat noticed
that the whale was trailing a length of the kind of line which is used to
connect surface buoys to seabed lobster pots.
The
Orange County sheriff harbor patrol and whale disentanglement experts from the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were called out and
spent hours on Friday tracking the whale and attempting to free it. But the
distressed whale kept diving out of sight or trying to leap, despite showing
increasing fatigue, according to local TV reports.
Teams managed to cut away about 150ft of rope. On Saturday, the
experts were back in pursuit in inflatable boats, trying to use underwater
cameras to figure out exactly how badly the whale’s mouth was entwined.
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