The whale rescue season is off to an early start with a humpback freed from a herring net in Happy Adventure last week.

Wayne Ledwell of the Whale Release and Strandings group says the animal had busted free of the mooring of the herring net, and towed the net out into the bay where it must have gotten hooked in something else.

Ledwell admits, freeing the whale wasn’t easy.

“It was a hard whale,” Ledwell laughs thinking back on it. “The headrope of the gillnet was through its mouth and the rest of it was a jumble of floats and the lead rope and the twine was around its side fins. That’s a particularly sensitive area for the animal, around their side fins. So, it was a job for us to get close to it. It kept turning around on us, and you know, trying to smack us and that kind of stuff.

It took about five hours, but they finally managed to get the animal free.