Being trained to disentangle whales from nets, lines and assorted fishing gear might seem like an obscure skill that one would never use.
But twice in the past several weeks Paul Cottrell has had an opportunity to put that training to use, both times on an accident prone humpback named Twister.
The latest call to Mr. Cottrell, Marine Mammal Coordinator for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, came when a fisherman put out a frantic radio call for help saying he'd caught "a really big fish" in his gear.
"He didn't speak very good English, but the big fish turned out to be a humpback whale," said Mr. Cottrell, who is part of a new DFO unit that responds to reports of marine mammals in distress.
This spring Twister, a 9-metre-long whale, moved into Knight Inlet on British Columbia's central coast, and began feeding on schools of krill and small fish.
Unfortunately for the whale, prawn boats were in the same area, setting strings of traps on lines thousands of metres long.
Diving in pursuit of food, the humpback whale has twice caught one of those lines in its mouth and, being unable to back up, has found itself towing around a string of prawn traps out each side of its jaw.
"The whale has to keep swimming forward and so it can't shake the line," says Mr. Cottrell, who flew to the scene after two fisheries officers, Joe Humphries and Greg Plummer, had located the whale and radioed in a report.
Mr. Cottrell, who was among a handful of fisheries people trained at a whale disentanglement workshop in Vancouver four years ago, stopped en route to pick up a package of gear that DFO acquired in March and has stored in Nanaimo.
Among the equipment is a cutting device on the end of a long pole - which ironically looks a lot like a harpoon - and a set of satellite tracking devices so the whale can be relocated if it is lost overnight.
Rescuing whales can sometimes take more than a day, as Mr. Cottrell found in May when he was first called to Knight Inlet. On that occasion he found Twister had a relatively short piece of line tangled through his mouth, with about a dozen prawn traps trailing behind.
The DFO team worked hours to free him, but darkness fell before they got all the traps cut free, which was worrying because the satellite tracking tags weren't functioning.
"I hardly slept that night," recalled Mr. Cottrell. "I was up at 4 a.m. and luckily we were able to find him. He'd gone about 18 nautical miles overnight."
A few weeks ago Mr. Cottrell was called back to Knight Inlet - on what was only his second entangled whale call - and again he found Twister with a prawn line caught in his mouth.
This time the humpback had made a real mess of it, twisting up in a 3,000-metre length of rope that was towing about 50 prawn traps, weighing nearly 300 kilograms.
Mr. Cottrell, Mr. Humphries and Mr. Plummer caught up to the whale in a rigid hulled, inflatable DFO patrol boat. They pulled the outboards out of the water, so the props wouldn't cut Twister, and then began to hand line themselves up the prawn rope, inching closer and closer to the whale, which was now towing their boat as well as all the prawn traps.
"Our big fear was that the gear might get caught on the bottom, pull him down, and drown him," said Mr. Cottrell.
They got close enough to the whale to be able to reach out and touch it. But Mr. Cottrell said they weren't worried the whale, which could have flipped the boat with its powerful tail, was going to lash out at them.
"They are really gentle giants," he said of humpbacks. "I don't know if he was aware we were trying to help him, but as we got closer and lifted up the weight of the prawn traps, he slowed down ... he knew where the boat was and he was really careful not to hit us."
After nearly two hours, Mr. Cottrell slipped the cutting device into the water near Twister's mouth and the moment it touched the taut rope, the braided line parted with a snap.
"It just popped," said Mr. Cottrell. The line fell away on both sides and after being entangled for an about 19 hours, Twister dove free.
"It's an incredible feeling, realizing the line is gone and he's going to be OK," said Mr. Cottrell. "It just brings this euphoria. It's like scoring a goal in triple overtime."
Mr. Cottrell asks members of the public who see distressed, dead or entangled marine mammals to call the Marine Mammal Incident Reporting Hotline at 1-800-465-4336.
