The 25-foot whale appeared to be healthy, but a three-person stranding team from the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center could not tell how badly it was entangled, said team member Jeff Thompson.
“When we got there, it was about 3 miles northwest of Kiptopeke State Park,” Thompson said. “It was swimming strong.”
The team approached in an inflatable boat and attached a GPS tracking buoy to the net trailing behind the animal, but the buoy came loose about 10 minutes later, he said, and the whale submerged.
The aquarium stranding team is part of the Atlantic Large Whale Disentanglement Network, a series of first responders along the East Coast. Attaching buoys is a common strategy used by rescuers, adapted from an old-time whaling technique called “kegging.”
Once a tracking buoy is attached, rescuers follow the whale and keep adding buoys to increase drag and slow down the animal. As it tires, they begin trying to remove the entangling gear.
Thompson said the humpback whale was spotted about 1:30 p.m. by a fisherman. Its length was initially estimated at 65 feet, but it turned out to be less than half that size.
An airplane from the Virginia Marine Resources Commission helped keep track of the whale until the stranding team arrived. The commission, Coast Guard and the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries had ships standing by as the team attempted the dangerous job of cutting the net off a free-swimming whale.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees all stranding work with marine mammals, says that whales’ reactions to disentanglement efforts varies by species: “North Atlantic right whales are the most difficult whales to disentangle because they are extremely powerful animals that put up a seemingly endless fight instead of giving in to disentanglement efforts as humpbacks normally do.”
The humpback off Cape Charles, however, did not cooperate.
“The thing gave us the slip,” Thompson said. “We have talked to local fishermen and asked if they see it again to please give us a call.”
Boaters should not attempt to disentangle the whale themselves, he said.
Disentanglement efforts can take hours or even days. In 2005, a team from another organization followed a right whale for 60 miles and 20 hours before freeing it. That whale had been spotted off Virginia nearly a month before rescuers were able to track it down off Georgia and free it.
Thompson said the Virginia Aquarium is called to disentangle a large whale on average every other year. In 2007, the team successfully removed a commercial gill net from a humpback off Virginia Beach.
In that case, the net anchored the whale in place, but allowed it to surface for breathing.
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