BEAUFORT, N.C. — Rescue workers have freed a rare whale caught up in fishing line in Onslow Bay. Part of the line remains stuck in the animal's mouth, but workers said the North Atlantic right whale can eat and seemed safe from serious harm.

"We felt we did the best we could with this animal," said Greg Krutzikowsky of the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies, part of a multistate consortium trying to save right whales. "We have no clue when we'll have our next opportunity. It is the middle of winter."

The young whale, estimated at 2 or 3 years old, was first seen in September in Canada's Bay of Fundy, where many right whales spend summers. Fishing line was caught in its mouth, knotted behind its blow hole and stretching about 40 feet behind it.

Marine biologists didn't see any sign of the whale again until Jan. 15, when it was spotted off the coast of Georgia near calving grounds where the whales winter. Workers with ropes and a buoy attached a global positioning system to the whale that allowed officials to track the animal after it fled.

A whale specialist with the Provincetown Center used satellite transmissions to predict the whale would arrive in Onslow Bay off the North Carolina coast this week. It was found Wednesday about 4 miles offshore from Camp Lejeune.

Crews from Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and elsewhere, took part in the rescue.

The whale tried to evade them, but workers in an inflatable boat got close enough to cut some ropes with a hook knife on a long pole. Repeated tries to cut the line near the mouth failed.

Officials aren't sure whether the animal was male or female.

North Atlantic right whales are among the most endangered large whales on the planet, with fewer than 400 surviving after being hunted nearly to extinction.