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TwitThisA Risky Rescue Mission
The two divers in snorkel gear dropped backward off the inflatable boat into the Pacific Ocean. Cautiously they swam toward the humpback lying weak and exhausted in the waves. The water was 53 degrees, dark and frothy like the foam on a beer. They could barely tell the animal's head from its tail.A huge flipper, eight or nine feet long -- the whale's left pectoral fin -- rose up a yard away. One slap could kill a man.
Thick nylon crab ropes, called blue steel because of their strength, wound around the fin, through the whale's mouth and over its head. In some spots the lines sliced so deeply they disappeared into the animal's flesh.
Left like this, the whale would die.
Professional dive master James Moskito spent about as much time in the water as he did on land. Still boyish-looking at 40, he now worked for a company that took people on shark adventures, up close and personal. From mid-September to mid-November, he led divers enclosed in steel cages down into the hunting grounds of great white sharks off the Farallon Islands, some 30 miles outside San Francisco Bay.
This Sunday in mid-December 2005, he and his girlfriend, Holly Drouillard, were planning something a little more mellow: a trip to his parents' home.
Before hitting the freeway, Moskito checked his voice mail and found a message from Mick Menigoz, the skipper of a charter fishing boat. A whale was trapped in crab lines and floundering at sea. Menigoz was putting together a group of divers to assist volunteers from the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito. Would Moskito come with them?
"I'm in," Moskito said.
During his 26 years in the Air Force, Tim Young had parachuted out of helicopters and huge, four-engine C-130 airplanes -- with full scuba gear and a load of medical supplies -- to rescue people in precarious situations.
The summons from Menigoz that interrupted his family's Sunday breakfast, however, was unusual even for Young. Without hesitation, he tossed his diving equipment into the car and headed for the Emeryville harbor where Menigoz's boat, Superfish, was docked.
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