Posted on 09/14/2020 7:24:29 PM PDT by Roman_War_Criminal
Reports of orcas striking sailing boats in the Straits of Gibraltar have left sailors and scientists confused.
Just what is causing such unusually aggressive behaviour?
When nine killer whales surrounded the 46ft boat that Victoria Morris was crewing in Spain on the afternoon of 29 July, she was elated. The biology graduate taught sailing in New Zealand and is used to friendly orca encounters.
But the atmosphere quickly changed when they started ramming the hull, spinning the boat 180 degrees, disabling the autohelm and engine. The 23-year-old watched broken bits of the rudder float off, leaving the four-person crew without steering, drifting into the Gibraltar Straits shipping lane between Cape Trafalgar and the small town of Barbate.
The pod rammed the boat for more than an hour, during which time the crew were too busy getting the sails in, readying the life raft and radioing a mayday – “Orca attack!” – to feel fear.
The moment fear kicked in, Morris says, was when she went below deck to prepare a grab bag – the stuff you take when abandoning ship. “The noise was really scary. They were ramming the keel, there was this horrible echo, I thought they could capsize the boat. And this deafening noise as they communicated, whistling to each other. It was so loud that we had to shout.” It felt, she says, “totally orchestrated”.
Very unusual orca behavior The crew waited a tense hour and a half for rescue – perhaps understandably, the coastguard took time to comprehend. To say this is unusual is to massively understate it. By the time help arrived, the orcas were gone. The boat was towed to Barbate, where it was lifted to reveal the rudder missing its bottom third and outer layer, and teeth marks along the underside.
Rocío Espada works with the marine biology laboratory at the University of Seville and has observed this migratory population of orca in the Gibraltar Straits for years. She was astonished. “For killer whales to take out a piece of a fibreglass rudder is crazy,” she says. “I’ve seen these orcas grow from babies, I know their life stories, I’ve never seen or heard of attacks.“
Highly intelligent, social mammals, orcas are the largest of the dolphin family, and behave in a similar way. It is normal, she says, that orcas will follow close to the propeller. Even holding the rudder is not unheard of: “Sometimes they will bite the rudder, get dragged behind as a game.” But never with enough force to break it. This ramming, Espada says, indicates stress. The Straits is full of nets and long lines; perhaps a calf got caught.
But Morris’s was only one of several encounters between late July and August. Six days earlier, Alfonso Gomez-Jordana Martin, a 31-year-old from Alicante, was crewing a delivery boat near Barbate for the same company, Reliance Yacht Management. They were proceeding under engine when a pod of four orcas brought their 40ft Beneteau to a halt.
He filmed them – it looks more like excitement and curiosity than aggression – but even this bumping damaged the rudder. And the force increased, he says, over 50 minutes. “Once we were stopped, they came in faster: 10-15 knots, from a distance of about 25m,” he remembers. “The impact tipped the boat sideways.“
The skipper’s report to the port authority said the force “nearly dislocated the helmsman’s shoulder and spun the whole yacht through 120 degrees.“
At 11.30pm the previous night, 22 July, Beverly Harris, a retired nurse from Derbyshire, and her partner, Kevin Large, were motor-sailing their 50ft boat, Kailani, just off Barbate at eight knots, when they came to a sudden standstill. It was flat calm, pitch black.
They thought they’d hit a net. “I scrambled for a torch and was like, ‘Bloody hell, they’re orcas,’” says Harris. The couple checked their position and found the boat pointing the opposite way. They tried to correct several times, but the orcas kept spinning them back. “I had this weird sensation,” Harris says, “like they were trying to lift the boat.“
It lasted about 20 minutes, but felt longer. “We thought, ‘We’ve sailed across the Atlantic, surely we’re not going to sink now!’” Their rudder was damaged but got them to La Línea. It was a long night. “Kevin said I should get some sleep. I said, ‘Are you joking? I’m having a gin and tonic,’” recalls Harris.
While enjoying her drink, Harris could have spared a thought for Nick Giles, having a sleepless night alone after an almost identical encounter off Barbate just two and a half hours earlier. He was motor-sailing, and playing music when he heard a sudden bang “like a sledgehammer.”
The wheel was “turning with incredible force” as the vessel spun 180 degrees, dislodging the autohelm and steering cables. “The boat lifted up half a foot and I was pushed by a second whale from behind,” he says. While resetting the cables, the orca hit again, “nearly chopping off my fingers in the mechanism.” He was pushed around without steering for about 15 minutes before they left him.
So what is going on underwater? Sonar? army tests? If human activity is affecting the orcas’ behaviour, human activity must be regulated. Activities producing underwater noise should be reduced to a minimum.
Only a female would say this.
Maybe one was angry you forgot her birthday? Perhaps you should invite them over for a nice chat over tea and seal blubber.
I’ve been reading “The Worst Journey in the World, with Scott in Antarctica 1910-1913” Cherry-Garrard, Dover. He describes what he calls “killer whales” trying to jump up on the edge of the ice to attack penguins and people close to the water.
They hit a sleeping killer whale. Killer whales got pissed
She should have yielded.
I hate to say it, but I vividly remember a video of a poor seal on a massive block of ice, clinging for dear life as a pod of Orcas did the exact same thing to the little iceberg, trying to get an easy meal.
Don’t know how it turned out, but I wonder if the Orcas were hungry, and wanted to check out how the funny looking animals on the iceberg with big cloth sails would taste.
I am happy to go my own way peacefully, but if that happened to me, I’d be looking at trying to smoke every Orca in range before the boat sank and I was in the water with them.
They converted to islam.
Just like with kids seeing violence on TV and in movies and then going out and committing that same violence, so too when a group of Oraca friends goes out and sees a movie like Jaws or Hunt for Red October ... I mean what do you expect? These adorable and impressionable little sea beings are just doing what they think is cool. Probably Sharknado should be banned from Seaters entirely.
I had no cable back then.
It was on TV.
So I watched it.
:D
The boats are trespassing
I’m with you. I think they were hungry and trying to sink the boats to get to the people inside. Great White Sharks have been known to do that.
Well...because black lives matter. I should think.
We’re seeing the early efforts of OLM (Orca Lives Matter).
The Orcas and, eventually, their idiot allies in the fish food community are “peacefully protesting” to support the activities of violent, murderous and rapacious Orcas in their community.
Maybe their old name, killer whales might be a clue. I worked on an albacore boat one summer and our boss would not let us on deck if he saw a killer whale’s fin. Ramming is how they attack whales. They keep at it until the whale opens his mouth, then they eat its tongue. They are not as cute and cuddly as some think.
Orcas are highly intelligent and successful predators which take down great white sharks and the largest whales. Surely it’s not that shocking when they get curious about what people taste like?
God, am I carbon-dating myself.
Note to self - if buying a sailboat, install a metal conduction bar along the keel, install another conductor along the waterline, and then wire it to a 20,000 watt generator for emergencies.
A friendly way of saying, get away from my boat.
Ditto that! And when cable first became available, Friday night all night at the movies on the TBS (maybe TNT) channel.
Killer whales unihemispherically sleep. One side of the brain sleeps, the other stays awake to breath and keep one eye open.
The sailboat makes very little noise through the water.
They hit a sleeping orca. The orcas got pissed.
Need bigger boats!
They saw the 1977 movie “Orca” with Richard Harris, and Bo Derek.
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