A young humpback whale was freed from entanglement off the coast of Cape Cod on Friday, according to the Center for Coastal Studies (CCS) in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
The whale was first discovered by a charter vessel just outside of Nauset Inlet in the early afternoon and alerted the CCS's Marine Animal Entanglement Response (MAER) team to the predicament.
The MAER team located the whale, which was towing orange bouys and 100 feet of line and had heavy line looped through its mouth and across its back, about three miles northwest of the Inlet.
After attaching a grapple with floats to the line in order to slow the whale down, the team cut away sections of gear at a time. Then, they were able to get close enough to the whale to get all of the line off of him before he swam away.
If a whale - or other types of sea life - is spotted entangled, call MAER's hotline at 800-900-3622 or the U.S. Coast Guard at VHF 16.
