A humpback whale severely entangled in derelict fishing gear 20 miles offshore of Newport was freed by a team of experts and a local fisherman, but is unlikely to survive because of damage to its jaw.

An Oregon team joined by experts from Washington and Newport-based fisherman Poggy Lapham removed the gear from the whale July 26, but the entanglement left the young whale’s jaw permanently open and unable to feed, according to a news release Tuesday from the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Oregon State University research assistant Craig Hayslip spotted the whale from a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter while surveying the coast for whales and fishing gear four days earlier, according to NOAA Fisheries. He reported the whale anchored by heavy fishing gear to NOAA’s West Coast Entanglement Hotline, which activates trained responders across the region.

Responders asked Lapham, who has taken marine mammal scientists out on his F/V Michele Ann, to help raise the gear and give responders access to free the whale. An online photo catalog identified the whale as a humpback previously sighted in British Columbia in 2024.

The fishing vessel recovered a tangle of more than 3,000 feet of line, five sablefish (black cod) pots, and individual commercial Dungeness crab traps from Oregon and Washington. The condition of the gear indicated that it could be derelict or lost gear, the news release said, and that NOAA Fisheries is following up with gear owners for more details.

Lapham told NOAA Fisheries that the entanglement should be a wake-up call for the industry to ask, “How can we better incentivize gear retrieval and tracking of lost gear to reduce this risk?”

“This is truly a heartbreaker because of the whale’s injuries, but we will learn so much from this case that can help us prevent future entanglements,” said Lauren Saez, who helped coordinate the response for NOAA Fisheries. “We disentangled the whale safely, got all the gear back, and had great collaboration with the fishing industry.”

The team from Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute and Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport had recently trained with entanglement experts from Cascadia Research Collective in Olympia, Wash., who also joined the response, said Jim Burke, the aquarium’s director of animal care. The group readied their boats and gear for just such an incident. A grant from the Oregon Wildlife Foundation paid for key safety, documentation, and response tools.

NOAA Fisheries has supported training to expand the capacity of the West Coast Large Whale Entanglement Response Program to respond more quickly to whale entanglements that have increased over the last decade. Threatened and endangered humpback whales that feed off the West Coast in summer are the most affected species, according to NOAA, with more than 30 humpbacks confirmed entangled last year.

In 2025, NOAA Fisheries convened a West Coast Take Reduction Team of commercial fishermen, Tribal representatives, scientists, fishery managers, and conservation groups to recommend measures to reduce humpback whale entanglements in sablefish pot gear. Agency officials notified members that the group will meet to review the recent entanglement as well as a humpback whale found dead off Oregon on July 7 after getting entangled in sablefish gear.

Most of the humpbacks that spend the summer feeding off the Oregon coast come from what is known as the mainland Mexico population that breeds off Mexico, according to NOAA spokesman Michael Milstein. While their numbers are increasing, the population is still listed as threatened under U.S. Endangered Species Act. There are an estimated 7,000 humpback whales off the Oregon, California and Washington coasts.

The rescue effort

The response to the entangled whale off Newport stretched over four days.

Hyslip spotted the whale July 23. The next day, responders reached the entangled humpback exactly where the helicopter team had spotted, according to NOAA officials. They attached a GoPro camera to the end of a pole which showed a line through the whale’s mouth that stretched out of sight into ocean 400 feet beneath it.

The whale’s jaw was “wide open beyond anything you would expect to see,” said Jim Rice, who manages the Oregon Marine Mammal Stranding Network for OSU and was on the team. “We could tell by the angle it was not natural.”

The line entangling the whale stretched so deep and tight the team could not reach it with cutting tools even after the U.S. Coast Guard brought a smaller inflatable boat used to get closer to the whale. They could not budge the gear from the sea floor about 400 feet below.

“We realized if a whale couldn’t move it, then we humans weren’t going to move it, either,” said Hayslip. They returned to Newport to plan another attempt. Rough weather kept them ashore the next day, but the team returned to the whale on July 26.

Responders directed the crew of the Michele Ann as they winched in a line drifting behind the whale that also descended to the gear on the bottom. That lifted the gear enough for a team in a smaller boat to cut the line to the whale, which later swam free.

The crew continued to reel in line and gear, with Lapham and the crew separating the tangled lines, sablefish and crab traps, and smaller gear from other fisheries. Lapham said the sablefish gear could not have been legally set in such shallow waters and may have been inadvertently pulled into the area by passing vessels, according to NOAA’s release.

Lapham is a member of NOAA’s Take Reduction Team working to reduce entanglements in the fishery. While crab traps must carry tags officials can use to identify the owner, sablefish traps are not required to carry tags, he said, and makes it more difficult to piece together what happens in whale entanglements. He said after the entanglement that he ordered tags for his sablefish traps.

This republished story is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit opb.org/partnerships.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/08/07/humback-whale-newport-oregon/