A young Hahei man rescued an exhausted and bloody orca yesterday after it was entangled in a cray pot.



The orca was discovered tangled in rope and cray pots several hundred metres off the Coromandel Coast yesterday afternoon.



"It had cuts all over its head from the rope… and down the tail there were a few rope burns and I could see blood from where the rope was," said Rhys Cochrane, who went to the whale's rescue.



Cochrane's family diving business had received a call from the Department of Conservation telling them that the mammal was in distress and needed to be let free.



It didn't take long for the 20-year-old and his father to find the whale, which was exhausted after dragging the cray pot up from the ocean's surface. A small pod of orca were nearby.



"I jumped in the water to see how it was tangled and noticed it was tangled around the tail, which means it could be cut free," Cochrane said. It took only minutes to free it.



While Cochrane often sees whales in the area, he has never discovered one caught in a cray pot.



But there are many stories of whales getting entangled in cray buoys and nets in New Zealand waters.



Cochrane used knives yesterday to cut the rope and free the orca, which he believed had been entangled for about an hour. But others take hours, if not days to free.



It took a week before a juvenile humpback whale was freed after becoming entangled in rope and cray buoys in the Queen Charlotte Sounds in July last year and a juvenile orca that got tangled in cray pot ropes in February last year was "on its last legs" before being rescued off the coast of Kaikoura.

TO THE RESCUE: Rhys Cochrane.