This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

A 10-metre humpback whale trapped off in netting off Bondi beach in Sydney may have to wait until Wednesday morning to be freed after darkness hampered rescue efforts.

Whale watchers were able to free the mammal of some of the netting but a rescue team from National Parks New South Wales was unable to fully release the whale before night fell.

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Passengers on a whale-watching cruise spotted the mammal about 2pm and spent several hours trying to help. A crew member, Jonas Liebschner, told the Sydney Morning Herald that the whale “was able to move more freely than before” after some of the netting was cut.



The rescue team took over but a spokeswoman told Guardian Australia that it had quickly become unsafe to fully disentangle the whale in darkness.

“The team, before it got dark, was undertaking a visual assessment of the animal by helicopter,” she said. “It is not safe to perform the disentanglement operation by nighttime. It was already too late in the day.”

She said the parks service was mobilising a specialist crew to attempt a disentanglement in the morning if they could locate the whale.