On Thanksgiving Day 40 years ago, staff from the Center for Coastal Studies (CCS) in Provincetown disentangled their first whale. This is the story of CCS scientist emeritus Stormy Mayo, and a humpback called Ibis.
Ibis had been struggling for some time with a gill net entanglement when Mayo and a crew of eight others found her late in the morning on Thanksgiving day.
They had no disentanglement system at the time, but Mayo’s father, a former whaler, suggested they attach large plastic floats to a grapple and throw it into the tangled net.
“Then we waited,” the younger Mayo said. “And eventually — actually, quite surprisingly — we hadn't done this before — she stopped. She just laid on the surface, tired and unable to dive.”
Once the whale was more stationary, crew members jumped into inflatable boats. Some began to free Ibis from the nets around her head, while Mayo went to her tail. He reached down into the water to touch a deep white gash, and it started to bleed. It was an unforgettable moment, he said.
“When you're dealing with a whale, they're so big that it's almost hard to believe it's a living thing. And yet here this whale was bleeding and gave me a personal sense of it being a living animal hurting and suffering.”
After four grueling and dangerous hours of cutting away lines and netting, the impromptu team had Ibis freed of her entanglement.
“And to our thrill,” he said, “she began to swim, and then swam very fast and was off to the horizon.”
By the time they finally got back to land, the team had missed their Thanksgiving feasts. But upon hearing what they’d done, Napi Van Dereck, owner of Napi’s Restaurant in Provincetown, sprang to action.
“Napi Van Dereck invited the entire crew to his restaurant and gave us a very special, memorable Thanksgiving dinner a couple of days later,” Mayo said.
The following spring on a whale watch boat, the crew spotted Ibis, alive and healing, as she swam and breached on Stellwagen Bank. Shortly after, she gave birth to a calf — which became one more lesson to the crew: when you save a whale, you may be saving generations of animals for the future.
“And that's pretty exciting and gratifying. But you don't start out there, of course. When you're doing something like Ibis, you have no concept other than ‘we've got to get this whale free,’” Mayo said. “You don't recognize that it will become what it has become.”
The methods the team piloted that day 40 years ago — attaching flotation to entanglements — has evolved with new technology, and has been used to save hundreds more whales in waters off Massachusetts and across the world.
Now how’s that for a Thanksgiving tale?
