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Shipping traffic at the Port of Port Elizabeth was disrupted on Tuesday after a juvenile Humpback whale ended up in a confined tanker terminal.
A spokesperson for the Nasional Sea Rescue Institute (NSRI) Craig Lambinon says hours earlier volunteers from the Whale Disentanglement Network had freed the 7-meter long mammal that got entangled in fishing rope.
He says the whale was monitored and appeared to be healthy but efforts to corral it out of the Port’s entrance and back out to sea were not successful.
Volunteers monitored the whale for an hour until they lost sight of it.
Lambinon says a short while later a call was received from Transnet security officers who had spotted the whale in the terminal.
He says on Wednesday there were no further sightings of the whale and they are cautiously optimistic that it had swum back out to sea.
