While swimming off the coast of Bayahibe in the Dominican Republic, a scuba diver and his partner helped rescue a frightened stingray from a painful situation.
On Jan. 7, 37-year-old Raffa Wake-Valais Sarbach and his partner spotted a ghost fishing line with three dead fish on a 20-meter piece of wire and two fish that were alive before noticing that a juvenile stingray was also caught on one end.
“It looked like a juvenile stingray as it was half the size of an adult one,” Mr. Sarbach said. “Fortunately, I think we were lucky and that it wasn’t hooked for too long, likely less than an hour.”
After carefully turning the stingray over, divemaster Mr. Sarbach worked for almost five minutes before managing to pull the hook out of the fish’s mouth without causing any further injury and letting it swim away.
“If I hadn’t managed to remove it, the hook could have caused the stingray to die,” Mr. Sarbach said. “It could have had trouble eating or even snagged the fishing line on a rock and been unable to swim away.”
