Recasting the Debate

Mark Ward won’t soon forget the look of distress so apparent in the eyes of the floundering whale -- large, hopeful eyes that met his after he’d dived in and attempted to cut away a large net in which the cow and her calf had become perilously entangled.

Nor will the retired fishing and diving guide be able to shake from his memory the thrashing he received from the 35-foot leviathan in a moment of panic -- a thrashing that caused him to likewise become entangled, and to be held under for so long that he took his knife and tried to saw his leg off in a desperate attempt to reach the surface.

These are lasting images and impressions.

But two weeks after the chaotic rescue attempt atop the choppy Sea of Cortez, 30 miles beyond San Carlos, Mexico, off the Sonora coast, Ward says it is the long, eerie, almost otherworldly cries of the stricken sperm whale that really have a grip on his mind.

“I haven’t had any nightmares yet, but I have woke up to that song,” the Tucson resident said this week from his part-time home in San Carlos. “I could hear her singing, like, her death song. She was crying for help.

“Never till two nights later, after a stiff drink, did I realize that she was probably not crying for her help or my help. She was crying for her baby.”

Ward, 51, had been listening to the VHF radio while doing yardwork on the afternoon of July 24 when a static-filled plea for help came across the airwaves.

Dick Replogle, on a sport fishing trip with his sons, Bryan and Court, made the call. They had found the whale and her calf “wrapped like a cigar three times” in a monofilament net presumably abandoned by its owners when they saw what their haul was. The calf, pressed tightly against her mother, had already perished and its carcass had begun to deteriorate.

Replogle, 60, also from the Tucson area, had tied his vessel to the netting and his sons had jumped in to try to cut away as much of it as possible.

They had freed the pectoral fins and tail, and had also managed to separate the calf. But without masks or other diving equipment, that was as much as they could do.

Ward and his girlfriend caught a ride aboard a fast boat and arrived just before dusk, and he volunteered to jump in with a mask and snorkel -- “I didn’t use a tank because the bubbles might have frightened her,” he said -- and see whether he could remove the netting still attached to the animal’s midsection and jaw.

What happened next was a scene evocative of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick,” which pitted Capt. Ahab against the great white whale that had once maimed him.

The net was a drift gill-net, a controversial type of fishing gear that resembles nets used on volleyball or tennis courts, only much wider and with much larger mesh. They have weights to keep the lower portions down and floats to keep them upright.

They can measure up to three miles and, because of their indiscriminate and destructive nature -- they’re commonly referred to as “curtains of death” -- their use has diminished in many parts of the world. Mexico is allowing them inside its 50-mile sportfishing-only zone as part of what it calls a limited shark fishery.

Five long strands of the net had worked their way “just like dental floss” between the teeth and gums on the sperm whale’s lower jaw, and around the jaw itself, Ward said. Dangling beneath the jaw was at least one of the weights attached to the net.

“Looking into that mouth was absolutely like being in a monster movie,” Ward recalled. “But I knew I had to tough it out.”

Remarkably, the whale seemed to sense that an effort was being made on its behalf. She allowed Ward to probe her mouth and with each long breath he carefully cut at the strands of netting. He had removed three strands before accidentally nicking the whale’s tongue with his knife.

That brought about an entirely different type of behavior.

“She was trying to kill me,” Ward said. Perhaps out of instinct, the whale became full of fight. As Ward described it, she slapped her pectoral fins hard against her body, creating a current that left Ward swirling beneath her jaw. She then pushed the diver down with her head and spun her massive body.

As she spun, the netting twisted around Ward’s ankle and lower calf. Desperately in need of air, he began to saw at the netting. But when that wouldn’t give he realized that amputation might be his only salvation.

“It was either the net or the leg,” he said. “I was absolutely sawing my whole leg off about 15 inches above the ankle.”

Fortunately, not long after he’d begun to cut, the netting unraveled “like a twisted-up rubber band” and the diver, along with the whale, reappeared at the surface.

“As I told my old lady, my ankle went around like the chick’s neck on ‘The Exorcist,’ ” Ward said.

His girlfriend cared for his wound until the boat made landfall, upon which he received 12 stitches for a cut that extended to the bone.

The fate and whereabouts of the whale, meanwhile, remain unknown. John Brakey, executive director of the conservation group Friends of the Sea of Cortez, last weekend launched an air search effort that remains underway in an effort to find an animal he refers to as Ms. Moby.

The search has yet to turn up any sign of the whale -- a good sign, he says, because freshly dead whales typically bloat and float for weeks.

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If there is an upside to this incident, Brakey said, it is the publicity it might generate as conservationists and sport fishing interests continue their tireless fight to keep gill-nets and long lines -- another type of indiscriminate gear, with lines extending as far as six miles with thousands of baited hooks -- out of the Sea of Cortez, one of the world’s richest marine areas.

Commercial fishermen have been trying for the last several years to get inside Mexico’s 50-mile buffer zone -- a zone intended to protect important fisheries in the Sea of Cortez, which is less than 100 miles wide, and along coastal areas.

They’ve had little success until recently. They argue that such exclusion is unfair and makes it difficult for them to make a living, and that there isn’t enough scientific evidence to back claims by environmentalists that various fisheries won’t be able to sustain the added pressure.

Mexican fisheries agencies, which have been holding meetings for the development of a new shark-fishing regulation in hopes that it will enable them to manage the fishery in a manner good for both fishermen and the economy, have been reluctant to include a ban on gill-nets and long lines.

Meanwhile, they have issued 201 “experimental” permits to fish for sharks inside the buffer zone. Commercial boats in the Sea of Cortez are mostly converted shrimp-fishing vessels using gill-nets in the prolific midriff area where several species of shark are known to mate and pup.

The trouble with this, scientists say, is that sharks are already overfished and gill-nets and long lines don’t know the difference between sharks and important game fish such as marlin, sailfish, tuna and dorado (mahi-mahi).

Nor, as it has again become clear, do they discriminate against whales, other mammals and turtles.

In an e-mail communication this week with Brakey, Juan Pablo Gallo Reynoso, a prominent whale researcher living in Guaymas, said the sperm whale was “at least the fifth whale found entangled in any sort of a net” in recent months, and listed among the victims two gray whales, a blue whale and two sperm whales, “both of which lost their babies.”

Guillermo Alvarez, a government appointee representing the tourism sector, in essence labeled Mexican President Vicente Fox a hypocrite this week for publicly announcing, several months ago, that Mexico would become known as a whale sanctuary.

“This is starting to look more like a whale cemetery than a sanctuary,” said Alvarez, who is also executive director of the Mexican Billfish Foundation, a conservation group.

So far, news of the latest incident has yet to reach mainstream audiences in Mexico and there has been no public response from Fox. But there is little doubt that he is aware of what’s going on.

Last summer, fisheries officials came close to publishing as law, almost without notice, a regulation that would have opened almost all Mexican waters to extensive use of gill-nets. Instead, the public got wind and the outcry was such that the president ordered its suspension and indefinite withdrawal.

Now the shark regulation is back in the spotlight, taking shape in a manner still under discussion, with controversy swirling anew as Ward hobbles around on a bad leg, wondering whether his heroic effort did any good.

“I’m just glad to be alive,” he said.