LAGUNA BEACH — Efforts by a local disentanglement team were unsuccessful on Tuesday, April 24 as they tracked a gray whale tangled in what appears to have been a drift gillnet. The whale was swimming north along the Orange County coast.
The approximately 25-30 foot whale was first spotted by Capt. Steve Burkhalter aboard the Dana Pride, a whale-watch boat operated by Dana Wharf Whale Watching before noon Tuesday off Beach Road in Capistrano Beach. At that time, Burkhalter wasn’t sure whether the whale was tangled-up.
As it word spread, Capt. Marie Clark on Capt. Dave Anderson’s Manut’ea and her deckhand, Tanner Rollins, saw the whale pass near the mouth of Dana Point Harbor.
A private boat, the Serendipity, stayed with the whale for five hours until the disentanglement team was able to make it out near Strand Beach, said Clark.
The team, including Justin Greenman from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, caught up with the whale about three miles off the coast of Laguna, parallel to the Surf & Sand Resort.
By 6 p.m.efforts to cut the line from the whale had been unsuccessful, said Rollins. He and Greenman, along with a representative from the Pacific Marine Mammal Center and another boat captain, were on board with Capt. Dave Anderson, who operates Capt. Dave’s Dolphin and Whale Watching Safari.
“It’s traveling north with big heavy breaths,” Rollins said. “That’s making it hard for us.”
Anderson, who heads up Orange County’s disentanglement team, said he and his group spent about two-and-a-half hours with the whale off Laguna Beach and tried to attach a tracking buoy but failed.
“The whale appears to have a gillnet wrapped around it,” said Anderson, who on Wednesday, April 25, will testify in Sacramento to state lawmakers about the entanglement problems and some options he has developed.
California remains the one state where drift gillnet fishing is legal, and the Legislature has authority over remaining gillnet permits. State lawmakers in the past years have sent letters to the Pacific Fishery Management Council and National Marine Fisheries Service, demanding a transition to alternative fishing methods.
Anyone seeing the whale is asked to call NOAA’s hotline at 877-767-9425.
This year there have been seven reports of entangled whales, according to NOAA. In 2017, there were 40 reports and 30 sightings were confirmed along the West Coast. In 2016, 71 entanglements were reported.
