(WSVN) - A South Florida fisherman reeled in more than he bargained for on a recent trip near Guatemala.
“We were trolling offshore and I look off to my right and I saw something that kind of didn’t look right,” said Captain David Salazar.
What Salazar saw was a whale in distress.
He and his crew were sport fishing in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Guatemala earlier this week when they spotted the massive mammal.
But something was wrong.
“Once we saw it was a whale trapped in the net, we obviously started trying to figure out how to get the whale out,” said Salazar.
That’s when he made the decision to try to free the aquatic beast.
“We got a hold of the net, the whale kind of started moving around, acting kind of weird, and then all the sudden she kind of figured out that we were trying to help her and she literally calmed down and just let us do what we had to do,” said Salazar.
The crew managed to wrangle the net and began cutting it up. They were able to free the entangled whale’s face and fins in about 15 minutes.
Salazar said in his twenty-plus years of fishing, he’s never experienced anything like this.
“We’ve untangled a bunch of turtles. We find turtles all the time tangled up in abandoned long lines and stuff, but we’ve never untangled a whale, so that was pretty cool,” he said.
Salazar said the whale circled the boat a couple of times after being freed before heading south.
The whale was bigger than his boat, Salazar said, which is over 40 feet long.
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