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40 Years of

Whale Rescue

David Mattila, Sharon Pittman, and Mary
Pratt-Havermale during the Thanksgiving Day
disentanglement of Ibis.

Forty years ago, on Thanksgiving Day, 1984, Charles “Stormy” While working on the tangled net, Stormy noticed that Ibis
Mayo and David Mattila of the Center for Coastal Studies had a deep gash on her tail stock. He wondered if she had
performed their first-ever successful whale disentanglement. enough blubber to survive, as she wouldn’t have been able to
The whale was a humpback called Ibis. feed for months. He reached down and touched the wound,

Ibis had been observed many times by CCS researchers. and Ibis started to bleed. For Stormy, the moment was an
Stormy Mayo, who named the whale based on a mark epiphany, speaking to the relationship between man and
resembling the Egyptian hieroglyph, said, “She was an old whale. “It was a sign that she feels. This is a living breathing
friend, I knew her well.” creature. She’s one of us, she’s suffering.”

Just a month or so earlier, Stormy and Carole Carlson, an After four hours of exhausting and dangerous work, Ibis was
assistant scientist at the time, had attempted a rescue of free of her entanglement. “The last view I had was Ibis and
Ibis while she was “anchored” off Gloucester Harbor. It another whale swimming north, diving, tails up,” said Stormy.
appeared that the gill net Ibis had been dragging for months It had been a long day, and the rescuers had missed their
had become lodged in something on the bottom. The tide Thanksgiving feasts. The following day, upon hearing this,
was rising. Ibis was struggling to break the surface to get Napi Van Dereck, owner of Napi’s Restaurant, hosted a lavish
air. Stormy and Carole hooked on several floats to try to help Thanksgiving feast for the entire crew at the restaurant.
her stay on the surface, but the weight pulling her down was The next spring, from the deck of a whale watch boat, the
too great, and she remained submerged. The crew returned crew watched Ibis, alive and healing well from her ordeal,
home to Provincetown, convinced Ibis was dead. breaching and swimming on Stellwagen Bank.
Late in the morning on Thanksgiving Day, Stormy and
David, accompanied by Stormy's father Charlie, Mary Pratt-
Havermale, Sharon Pittman, Mark Gilmore, and Carol "Krill"
Carson, headed into Cape Cod Bay aboard the R/V Halos to
record whale acoustics near Long Point.

“Lo and behold, there was Ibis,” recalled Stormy. Seeing
that she was still entangled, Stormy and David clambered
into inflatable boats.
“This was before we had a disentanglement system,” said
Stormy. Improvising, David suggested that they throw a
grapple anchor tied to large plastic floats into the tangled
net. This technique, to add flotation to the entanglement, is
adapted from a whaling technique known as “kegging,” and Stormy Mayo, Carole Carlson, and Mike Williamson during
is now a fundamental tactic in whale rescue. their first, unsuccessful attempt to free Ibis off Gloucester.

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