03/06/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/18UGdaH3Gy/?mibextid=wwXIfr
The whale was drowning in plain sight.
A juvenile humpback off Maui's coast. Wrapped in HUNDREDS of feet of heavy cable. The line ran straight through its mouth. It couldn't close its jaw. It could barely surface to breathe. Frantic. Evasive. Sinking under the weight of what humans left behind.
Ed Lyman got the call.
He's the Large Whale Entanglement Response Coordinator for the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. That's a fancy title. But his actual job is this - climb into a tiny inflatable boat, approach a PANICKING 40-ton animal in open ocean, and cut it free with a knife on the end of a pole.
He's done it over 120 times. He's personally freed more than 50 whales. In Hawai'i alone, his team has removed over 15,000 feet of tangled gear since 2003. Fishing line. Mooring ropes. Nets dragged 2,500 miles from Alaska to Hawai'i by whales that didn't know they were already dying.
Think about what that actually means.
You're in a rubber boat. The ocean is moving. The whale is moving. It weighs MORE than a school bus. One swipe of that tail and you're gone. Lyman once got so close that a whale lifted its head out of the water and looked him directly in the eye. Then it swung its tail at the boat.
He called it "risky business."
He went back out the next day.
The 2024-2025 season was the BUSIEST in the program's 23-year history. 32 entanglement reports. 17 on-water rescue missions. Seven animals approached in open water by people in inflatable boats with knives on poles. Every rescue could be their last.
And still - they go.
Here's what stays with me. In 2017, Lyman's team freed a young whale wrapped in over 800 feet of coaxial cable. Some of it was so deeply embedded in the whale's mouth they couldn't remove it. They did what they could. They let it swim away.
Seven years later, that same whale was spotted off Maui. Healthy. Full grown. Gliding through the sanctuary with NO sign of injury. The cable was gone. The wounds had healed. It came back.
They don't always come back. Some entangled whales die slowly. The ropes saw through skin. Cut off circulation. Tails go necrotic. The whale can't swim fast enough to eat. It starves. It sinks. And nobody ever counts it.
An estimated 300,000 whales and dolphins get tangled in fishing gear every single year. Most of them are never found.
Ed Lyman has been doing this for over two decades. One whale at a time. One knife. One inflatable boat against the entire ocean.
When a rescue team frees a whale, the animal sometimes BREACHES - launching its entire body out of the water. Lyman watched one do it right after they pulled the last of the line from its mouth.
"I think it was happy to be free," he said.
Some people save the world with speeches. Some save it with policies. Ed Lyman saves it 40 tons at a time, from a rubber boat, with a blade on a stick.
And the ocean remembers.
