As mad as that title may seem
Let's put this non-sensationally (the crew had a cup of tea and "just waited it out"); if THIRTY orcas had attacked the yacht it would not have been left afloat.
If you read my posts on humans killing off "sea monsters" then you will know, as outlined in Pursuing The Strange and Weird in more detail, that sea creatures identified as "sea serpents" had recognised migratory routes as well as "seasons" in which they were reported. These seemed to follow the same routes as squid and whales -which might have been prey. A sailing ship woyuld appear from below the sea to have the shape of a whale so might have been attacked by a giant squid or other animal until the mistake was realised.
https://terryhooper.blogspot.com/2017/02/humans-have-probably-killed-off-sea.html
https://terryhooper.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-fact-may-be-that-sea-monsters-of.html
We know that ships vanished even in calm waters. We also know that whales attacked whaling ships -how the story of Moby Dick came about. We know small squid fishing boats and fishermen have been "unusually attacked" by squid or that certain squid have behaved "aggressively" towards humans.
None of these creatures are stupid and are recognised for the IQs -often played down by pro fishing/whaling circles. In certain areas even the friendlier dolphins have been "aggressive" towards humans. The same with some seals.
Humans have slaughtered many millions of sea creatures as well as driven others to extinction but the myth of "unthinking" animals is still perpetuated. Orcas are now making it clear, as are some other species, that you kill them and their young often for no reason other than "They eat fish" then you are being warned.
NO CREW were attacked.
Read this story then the one that follows. 'Dumb animals'?
British yacht crew attacked by pod of 30 killer whales
The British crew of a luxury yacht feared for their lives after a pod of 30 killer whales attacked their boat - and even made off with the rudder.
Martin Evans, 45, and Nathan Jones, 27, were part of a three-man crew delivering the vessel from Ramsgate, Kent, to Greece.
The 25ft orcas bizarrely circled and smashed into the boat for two hours, before one munched on the rudder, and swam off with a chunk in its mouth.
The team feared for their lives during the attack near the Strait of Gibraltar, and shocking video shows the destructive animals attack.
They managed to sail the yacht to the peninsula at the southern edge of Spain, but were left stranded without a vessel when it was deemed too damaged to use.
Martin said: "I was on watch at the time and the boat was on autopilot meaning it was self steering.
"We'd had problems with autopilot during the trip - every so often it would malfunction. I turned around and saw the wheel moving frantically left to right on its full lock.
"I thought 'Oh my God, we've got a huge problem with the autopilot' initially but then it was quickly obvious that it wasn't the autopilot at all.
"I jumped round, took the helm, turned off the autopilot so I could manually steer and the wheel was just getting ripped from my hand.
"As I looked to my left and right - my port and starboard - there were orcas on either side of the boat, swimming along with us and bashing into the rudder.
"We were motoring with a sail up at that point, trying to make headway towards Gibraltar.
"The seas were fairly rough and we had to drop the sails and turn the engine and all of the electrics off.
"We had the Spanish coastguard contacting us because they'd heard over the radio that another boat ahead had seen us on their automatic identification system.
"An English skipper sent us a message saying 'Kismet, Kismet, there's orcas in the area'.
"We dealt with the initial orca attack for about an hour. There was nothing we could do, we just had to sit in the boat and wait for them to go away.
"We waited the attack out on the yacht with a cup of tea - the good British way to respond to killer whales attacking your boat.
"As this is going on and the rudder was going side to side, we knew it was going to cause damage because there was no way it could handle that amount of abuse.
"We could hear a clunking sound coming from the steering mechanism, giving us an idea that something had stretched, either the cables or the chains.
"We looked behind the boat and there were bits of rudder floating in the sea.
"The foam core that builds up the internal of the rudder had been torn out - whether it had snapped off from the orcas' tails or chewed off with their teeth, we couldn't tell.
"We saw one of the orcas cheekily swimming away from the boat with a chunk of rudder in its mouth.
"With the rudder damaged, we realised something was wrong with the actual steering system - this wasn't just being bumped and assaulted by killer whales but we were really in a more dire situation.
"We were concerned that if the boat started to take on water and we began to sink then would we have to deal with the orcas in the water?
"We felt safe in the boat but wouldn't have in the water, that would have been petrifying.
"Fortunately, the rudder was still attached to the boat, albeit damaged and we still had steering.
"We had about two hours of dealing with this orca attack and then as suddenly as they had arrived, they went away and we managed to get to Gibraltar."
The journey from Kent to Greece should have taken the Halcyon Yachts crew 26 days but the boat will now stay in Gibraltar, following the attack on June 17.
Incredibly, Martin managed to keep his cool during the attack and was able to film the shocking moment that the orcas destroyed the rudder of the German-owned yacht.
Martin and Nathan have since flown to Greece and have decided not to sail past Gibraltar when returning to the UK on Martin's boat, the Aqua Sue.
He believes that his vessel would not have survived the orca attack.
Martin said: "We were aware of the orca interactions that had been happening because our company had had boats attacked previously.
"I've got friends who are marine biologists around the world and they're all interested in these very unusual developments where orcas have decided that they're going to start attacking boat rudders.
"There was a stop on smaller yachts sailing along the coastline between Portugal and Spain earlier in the year due to these attacks but they'd mostly occurred further west from where we were."
Now Read this:
Gangs of aggressive killer whales are shaking down Alaska fishing boats for their fish: report
The animals have learned to target individual boats, and are leading fishers on high-speed chases to get away
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The orcas will wait all day for a fisher to accumulate a catch of halibut, and then deftly rob them blind. They will relentlessly stalk individual fishing boats, sometimes forcing them back into port.
Most chilling of all, this is new: After decades of relatively peaceful coexistence with cod and halibut fishers off the coast of Alaska, the region’s orcas appear to be turning on them in greater numbers.
“We’ve been chased out of the Bering Sea,” said Paul Clampitt, Washington State-based co-owner of the F/V Augustine.
Like many boats, the Augustine has tried electronic noisemakers to ward off the animals, but the orcas simply got used to them.
“It became a dinner bell,” said Clampitt.
John McHenry, owner of the F/V Seymour, described orca pods near Alaska’s Aleutian Islands as being like a “motorcycle gang.”
“You’d see two of them show up, and that’s the end of the trip. Pretty soon all 40 of them would be around you,” he said.
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A report this week in the Alaska Dispatch News outlined instances of aggressive orcas harassing boats relentlessly — even refusing to leave after a desperate skipper cut the engine and drifted silently for 18 hours.
“It’s gotten completely out of control,” Alaska fisherman Jay Hebert told the paper.
Fishing lines are also being pillaged by sperm whales, the large square-headed whale best known as the white whale in Moby Dick.
“Since 1997, reports of depredation have increased dramatically,” noted a report by the Southeast Alaska Sperm Whale Avoidance Project.
A remarkable 2006 video by the Avoidance Project captured one of the 50,000 kg whales delicately shaking fish loose from a line. After a particularly heavy assault by sperm whales, fishers are known to pull up lines in which up to 90 per cent of the catch has disappeared or been mangled.
Some skippers will try to outrun a hovering pod, but the time and fuel needed to dodge a persistent gang of whales can wreak havoc on a trip’s profitability.
“I’ve had the same sperm whale follow me 70 miles,” Michael Offerman with the F/V Kristiana told the National Post by email.
While fishing boats all across Alaska have reported harassment by orcas, the worst incidents all seem to be occurring in the Bering Strait, the body of water separating western Alaska from Russia.
In a 2014 study of Alaska fisheries, orcas snatching fish from lines were estimated to cost boats as much as US$500 per day. Compare that to Uruguay, where a 2015 study of boats using similar fishing techniques found that “the presence of killer whales in the fishing ground seems not to affect the catch per unit effort.”
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Whale predation on fishing boats is increasing in part due to a rebound of North Pacific whale populations brought about by the 1980s moratorium on commercial whaling.
Up until then, cod and halibut fishers were moving amongst whale populations that had been decimated by whaling fleets — and where survivors had learned to fear the approach of a boat engine.
“When I started fishing in the early 80s, when we saw a whale it was an event,” said Clampitt. “Now, they circle the boat.”
This is not the first time that Alaskan waters have been suddenly thrown into disorder by the changing appetites of killer whales. In the 1990s, researchers found that orca predation was responsible for a sudden collapse in Pacific sea otter populations not seen since the animals were driven to near-extinction by the fur trade.
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Orcas have remarkably complex social structures, with regionally distinct languages and hunting strategies. They’re also innovative; orcas have frequently been observed inventing new hunting tactics and then teaching them to others.
In April, orcas off Monterey Bay, Calif., killed four grey whale calves over eight days in what was described as an unprecedented “killing spree” by local media. Biologists attributed the episode to a single nine-member pod of orcas that had simply become unusually skilled at hunting grey whales.
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Similarly, harassed Alaska fishers say they are seeing increased numbers of juvenile whales — a possible sign that adult orcas are teaching their young to seek out fishing vessels for their meals.
McHenry describing pulling in lines cleared of fish, only to notice that some fish near the end of the line were merely gnawed.
“That was them teaching the little ones; it’s unfortunate the orcas are putting us out of business, because they’re really a phenomenal mammal,” he said.
The only surefire way to ward off a pod of hungry orcas is pot fishing. Rather than fishing with exposed lines, boats convert to “pots”; essentially giant crab traps that trap fish rather than hook them.
It’s not a cheap fix. A pot conversion on the F/V Augustine, for instance, cost $600,000 USD ($800,000 CDN). And while the method works for now, Clampitt suspects that orcas might innovate a way around them.
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“It’s possible at some point they might start hitting the pot,” he said.
Alaska fishing boats wouldn’t be the only northerners to be seeing more orcas lately. As polar ice cover melts, it has allowed pods of orcas to swim ever-deeper into the Arctic ocean, where Inuit have observed the newcomers wreaking havoc on the slow-moving local fauna.
An Inuit interviewee for a 2012 study on the phenomenon said orcas would sometimes kill “hundreds” of belugas at a time.
“When the killer whales had left the kill site, Inuit would collect the maqtaq (blubber) from the numerous dead belugas,” it noted.
Aside from humans, orcas are the world’s top apex marine predator. Found in all seven of the world’s oceans, pods of orcas have been seen handily killing other top marine predators, including great white sharks, walruses and leopard seals.
Unlike any other of the world’s large hunters, however, orcas have spared humans. Although captive orcas have caused human deaths, to date there is no record of a human ever being killed by an orca in the wild.
In fact, the only widely accepted account of an orca attack on a human occurred in 1972, when California surfer Hans Kretschmer suffered an orca bite to his left thigh.
National Post
