If you read the front page story of the SF Chronicle on--Thu, 15 Dec 2005 -- you would have read about a femalehumpback whale who had become entangled in a spiderweb of crab traps and lines. She was weighted down by100s of pounds of traps that caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She had 100s of yards of line (rope) wrapped around her body - her tail, her torso, a line tugging in her mouth.A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farralone Islands(outside the Golden Gate) and radioed an environmentalgroup for help. Within a few hours the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so bad off, the only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her - a very dangerous proposition; One slap of the tail could kill a few rescuers.They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually freed her. One of the divers, James Moskito, said the whale was peaceful during the hour or so it took him and others to cut the ropes and there was a vibration coming from the whale the whole time. Moskito said that when the whale realized it was free it began swimming in circles. ""It felt to me like it was thanking us, knowing that it was free and that we had helped it," Moskito said. She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time, and nudged them, pushed them gently around - she thanked them... some say it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives. The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth says her eye was following him the whole time, and he will never be the same.
Thou nobody really knows what was on the whale's mind, it's nice to think that the whale was thanking its rescuers...