A whale caught in an internet cable was nicknamed Hacker.
The whale, a humpback, off the coast of Norway, was entangled in a yellow
subsea internet cable.
Fortunately a wildlife photographer, Audun Rikardsen, was
in his boat near Kaldfjorden, a fjord near Tromso in northern Norway, when he
saw the entangled humpback.
Rikardsen alerted the local coastguard, and returned to
the area that same night with a friend to find and free the whale. After an
hour they saw the humpback. ‘Gradually, the whale started to understand we were
there with good intentions,’ said Rikardsen after the whale was cautious of the
humans. Rikardsen thought the whale was caught in fishing line.
They struggled for four or five hourse to free the whale,
but they couldn’t cut through the cord. ‘It came right alongside our tiny boat,
all 30 tonnes of it, and could easily have tipped us over, but instead, it was
asking for help.’
The coastguards arrived, but had to abandon the attempt
until morning. In the morning they called a diver from the fire and rescue
team, who went underwater to investigate how the whale was trapped. The cord
was wrapped around the whale’s head, and in its mouth, around a fin, and
tangled in its tail. Eventually they freed the whale.
It was only when they freed the whale that they realised
the cord was a subsea internet cable that should have been 170 metres underwater
on the bottom seabed of the fjord. Rikardsen’s village, Skulsfjord, had no
network or cellphone coverage for more than two weeks until the cable was
replaced. They called the whale, Hacker.
However, Rikardsen, the wildlife photographer, did get
this amazing photograph (www.audunrikardsen.com).
MARTINA NICOLLS is an international
aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of
Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet
(2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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