FREEING GREAT WHALES - TWO TRUE BLUE TALES

1.
 Whale Joy

 If you read a recent front page story of the San Francisco  Chronicle,

you would have read about a female  humpback whale who had become
entangled in a spider webof crab  traps and  lines.
She was weighted down by hundreds of pounds

of  traps  that caused her to struggle to stay afloat.

She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped around her body,

her tail, her torso, a line tugging in her mouth.

A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farallon Islands (outside the Golden Gate)

and radioed an environmental group for help. Within a few hours,

the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so bad off,

the only way to save her was to  dive in and untangle her

They worked for hours with curved  knives and  eventually freed her.

When she was free, the  divers say she swam in  what seemed like joyous circles.

She  then came back to each and  every diver, one at a time, and  nudged them, pushed them gently around as if she was thanking  them.
Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful  experience of their lives.
The guy who cut the  rope out of  her mouth said
her eyes were following him the whole  time,
and that he will never be the same.

 

2.

Freeing Valentine
  When Michael Fishbach set out for his day of boating around
the beautiful waters of the Sea of Cortez, he probably didn't think
that it would be the day

he and his friends would become wildlife heroes.
As luck would have it, that's exactly what happened.

The group came upon a stranded humpback whale who was so
tangled in a mesh of nylon netting that she was beginning to drown,
and as Fishbach noted in this video, was possibly an hour from death.
The crew worked tirelessly for more than an hour to free
the stranded whale and, to their elation, eventually succeeded.

Then, magic happened.

For miles on their ride home, the whale put on a beautiful show.

Fishbach co-founded The Great Whale Conservancy to help protect whales.
click under this line

 protec whales