I thought I’d planned my quick trip to the Isle of Skye to perfection. A brief stop at a festival in Portree to catch up with some pals, steal one of them away for a hike out to an epic bothy in the north of the island, then stop in with two amazing people on my way home to record my new podcast on whale entanglement. I never thought I’d be embroiled in the heartbreak of one.

It was on my way home that I stopped in to see Ellie MacLennan, the co-ordinator of the Scottish Entanglement Alliance and Bally Philp, the co-ordinator of the Scottish Creel Fishermen’s Federation. As I arrived, it was clear to see I had done so amid a flurry of activity. Quickly it dawned on me that the worst had happened. There was an active entanglement and stranding – just over the water from Skye – on the small Isle of Raasay. Eager to help, I was deployed to the island to gather information.

This wasn’t an ordinary stranding. This was a sperm whale – a leviathan of the ocean – and the first documented entangled sperm whale stranding on Scottish shores. It’s a species uncommon in these waters – one more likely to be in open ocean where they hunt for giant squid at depths of up to 2,000 metres. But on that day, I found myself hurriedly wading into the freezing February sea to race the rising tide, to determine whether the emaciated body – washed up onto a rocky beach – was still alive or not.

I watched its gigantic fluke for any signs of life. But it was moving only with the motion of the waves. Its last breath left as the water engulfed its exhausted body, the sea eventually covering its blow hole.

It was entangled in over one hundred metres of rope, most of which was wrapped around its jaw, wiring it shut. Seeing it on that beach, knowing there was nothing we could do, was heart-breaking. But worse was knowing that it must have suffered horrifically.

I took the rope back to Ellie, and the following day a team from the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme arrived to perform a necropsy to learn as much as they could from this incident. The necropsy was performed on that stormy beach – the worst conditions they had ever worked in. Despite this, volunteers arrived to help – a testament to a community that cares deeply about cetaceans in Scotland.