A California gray whale is moving freely after rescuers spent seven hours untangling it from a discarded fishing net off the Orange County coast, local media reported.

The young whale was spotted Friday night off the coast of Dana Point Harbor, Calif., covered in nearly 50 feet of fishing wire. Rescue crews suspected it had been dragging the nylon netting, which was filled with dead sea animals, for nearly a week.

“We had a sea lion, we had several sharks …  the whole ecosystem, you know, was in that netting,” Dave Anderson, who works with DolphinSafari.com and was part of the weekend rescue, told NBCLosAngeles.com.

The challenge: to cut through the netting without hurting the whale, which they named “Bart” after one of the boaters who stayed with the whale overnight as it drifted up the coast, reported The LA Times.

The rescue involved seven tiring hours of sawing through the nylon as rescue crews followed the whale for mile after mile out to sea.

“It was getting very frightening towards the end of the day because we were running out of time,” Anderson told NBCLosAngeles.com. Crews were using grappling hooks and lines to reel in the mammal and a knife to cut away debris, according to The LA Times. Then, at last, a line snapped as the whale dived down, pulling buoys down with it.

“Those buoys just went under the water all of a sudden,” Anderson told NBCLosAngeles. “And when they went under the water, I mean, it was like a scene from ‘Jaws.'”

When the whale came back up, he was free.