Whales are not at home in shallow water. Their territory is the deep, 200 feet or more. The one that showed up this week off Mahaicony, in water 70 feet deep (shallow for a whale) ended up there from becoming entangled in a fisherman’s net. Unless it was freed, the mammal would die. So when the word went out one Saturday evening that a whale was in distress, the volunteers who set out to help knew that, with night intervening, time was against them.
The fisherman who raised the initial alarm was Vridglall Ramesh ‘Gold Teeth’ Tiwari from Mahaicony. A fisherman for 40 years, working the ocean looking for snapper and gilbacker, he had found the whale, midday on Saturday, four miles off the East Coast, trapped in one of his nets.
