A Young Humpback Got Tangled in Fishing Gear Off Rockport — Here’s How Rescuers Set It Free

Did you know a whale can swim around the clock, tangled gear and all, for a full 24 hours before rescuers ever catch up to it? That’s exactly the race a Massachusetts rescue team ran this week — and won.

Boaters first spotted a young humpback whale off the coast of Rockport on Tuesday, towing a fishing buoy it had somehow bitten down on. By the time anyone could report it, daylight was already running out, so the Center for Coastal Studies’ Marine Animal Entanglement Response (MAER) team had to wait until morning to move.

**The search itself was no sure thing.** At 8 a.m. Wednesday, Scott Landry, who directs the MAER team, led about seven rescuers out of Provincetown to track the whale down. Since whales can keep swimming nonstop, there was no guarantee it would even be in the same stretch of water where it had last been seen. After four hours of searching, a tip from another boater finally led the team to the whale — young, likely just 1 to 2 years old, and clearly in distress, trumpeting loudly at the surface.

**Then came the hard part.** Rescuers attached large buoys to slow the anxious whale down, then worked it free using a long pole fitted with a hook-shaped knife. About an hour later, the last of the gear came off. The whale didn’t hesitate — it took off out of Ipswich Bay at high speed, which Landry says is actually the best sign a rescue team can hope for. The faster a freed whale swims away, the better its odds of a full recovery.

**Why this keeps happening:** Landry says entanglements aren’t rare this time of year — this was already the second whale his team has freed this summer, and he suspects more are out there struggling, unseen. The root cause isn’t fishing itself, he explains, but the rope involved in it — the same gear whales and fishing crews both gravitate toward, since both are drawn to the ocean’s richest waters. Left entangled, whales typically face a slow decline from infection and starvation rather than a quick death, which is exactly why fast response matters so much.

**How you can help:** If you spot an entangled whale, the Center for Coastal Studies asks boaters to call their rescue hotline or reach the Coast Guard by radio — the same kind of tip that led rescuers straight to this whale.

One tangled buoy, one exhausted young whale, and a team that didn’t stop until it was free.

Sources: coastalstudies.org