Alaska Volunteers Free 2-Year-Old Humpback From Gillnet

Heath Whitacre was chopping wood at home when his phone lit up with missed calls about a whale in trouble.

The Petersburg Marine Mammal Center volunteer grabbed his gear and rushed to Frederick Sound, where a two-year-old humpback was trapped in a gillnet still attached to a fishing boat. It was July 28, and the clock was ticking.

Whitacre and his team freed the net from the boat, but the murky glacial runoff from the nearby Stikine River made it impossible to see how badly the whale was tangled. After eight hours on the water with no success, they attached a bright green tracking buoy to the net and called in backup.

Enter Ed Lyman, NOAA's Large Whale Entanglement Response Coordinator. He'd spent decades rescuing whales and happened to be teaching a training session nearby on Chichagof Island when he got the call.

Lyman figured out what happened. The young whale likely tried to swim through the net, panicked, and twirled, wrapping the gillnet around its tail fins.

The next day, an all-star rescue crew assembled: trained volunteers, boat owners, Alaska State Troopers, and Lyman. They held a quick meeting, loaded whale-rescue gear, and set off to find that green buoy.

On the main rescue boat, Whitacre wielded his cutting tool (a telescoping pole with a homemade knife attached). Toby Bakos, the center's stranding coordinator, held onto Whitacre from behind to keep him from falling overboard.

The whale wasn't having it. It kept diving and dodging, forcing the team to make over 30 attempts to cut the line. They couldn't even see the tail most of the time through the silty water.

After two hours of cat and mouse, they struck gold. The line suddenly popped to the surface, the buoys stopped moving, and the whale swam away free.

Why This Inspires

This rescue shows what's possible when communities invest in wildlife response. The Petersburg Marine Mammal Center runs entirely on volunteers who train for years to handle exactly these situations. They work closely with fishermen and have the trust of the whole community.

For Whitacre, who made the crucial cut, it was his first successful whale rescue. "I was pretty excited about that," he said as the crew gathered in Petersburg's harbor for a debrief, standing around the recovered gillnet laid out on the dock.

One young whale swims free tonight because a community was ready.