In the wheelhouse of a crab boat named Heidi Sue, Mike Pettis watched the gray whale surface and shoot water through its blowhole.
Tangled around its tail was a polypropylene rope used to pull up crab traps. It took two men with serrated knives 40 minutes to free the whale, which swam away with a small piece of rope still embedded in its skin. That was in 2004, off the waters of Waldport, Oregon.
