Some 20 incidents between the orcas and small boats have been recorded in May (Stock picture: Getty)
A British sailor has told of the terrifying moment his boat was attacked by a group of killer whales off the coast of Gibraltar.
Captain Iain Hamilton was sailing on Friday, when a group of five killer whales, also known as orcas, staged what he described as a ‘choreographed’ assault on his boat.
The 60-year-old believes they were actually ‘playing with the rudders and just inadvertently rendered the boat very vulnerable and in a very dangerous situation’.
He first noticed a fin and then a ‘light bump’ which turned into a ‘very big bump’ from a whale trying to bite the rudder.
The captain told BBC Radio 4: ‘To begin with there was one big whale and four smaller whales and they were just bumping it and bumping it and then one of them managed to take off one of the rudders the boat has two.
‘Then we lost the second rudder so we had no mechanism of steering the boat and the whales were in charge of the boat and they pushed us around like a rag doll’.
By the end of the attack, both rudders on Mr Hamilton’s boat, called the Butey of the Clyde, were completely wrecked.
One of several boats, a catamaran, being repaired in Spain’s Barbate, close to Gibraltar (Picture: Getty)
The vessel is now marooned in a harbour close to the Mediterranean peninsula, with Mr Hamilton forced to wait in a nearby fishing village for his boat’s rudders to be fixed.
In the short time that Mr Hamilton has been there, another wrecked boat – a 60ft catamaran – has come into the harbour, adding to the several already awaiting repairs.
This is just the latest in a string of incidents where killer whales have attacked boats off Europe’s Iberian coast.
In the early hours of May 26, British sailor April Boyes had to call the Spanish coastguard for help after a pod of orcas broke the rudder and pierced the hull of her boat while she and her crew were on their way to Gibraltar.
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The 31-year-old said: ‘What started off as a seemingly unique encounter ended with orcas breaking off our rudder from the boat, then proceeding to tear bits off the boat for an hour.
‘A huge hole in the hull meant we had water ingress to other parts of the boat and the engine room, and I can honestly say it was a scary experience. We are all safe. I’m feeling grateful for the coastguard.’
At the beginning of this month, on May 2, Cambridge couple Janet Morris and Stephen Bidwell, were sailing a course off the coast of Morocco when they spotted a group of killer whales.
About killer whales:
Orcas, which are commonly called killer whales, are members of the same family as dolphins and are apex predators who chow down on fish and other large whales.
They were given their second name after ancient sailors who saw the mammals preying on larger whale species dubbed them ‘whale killers’, and this eventually got flipped around to ‘killer whales’
Despite the sinister-sounding name, there’s no record of an orca ever killing a human in the wild and attacks, in general, are rare.
The sea animals have 100 pointed teeth used to grasp and kill their prey, usually measure 5.5 – 9.8 metres in length and can weigh up to 5,500kg.
Orcas communicate through a range of clicks, whistles, pulsed calls, squeals, squeaks and screams. They have distinct ‘languages’ within their family groups.
Source: World Wide Fund for Nature/Whales.org
They were napping when they heard banging on the hull and the crew screaming, ‘Orcas! Orcas!’
Janet, 58, said: ‘Because everyone was calm it felt okay, but we were petrified, it wasn’t until afterwards that we talked about being very scared.
‘We got our valuables and our passports and talked about getting the life raft ready. The captain was very calm and orderly, which got everyone through.’
After an hour, the killer whales swam off but the steering on the boat had failed – a big issue for any vessel in adverse conditions – so they had to head back to port.
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There have been 20 incidents between the orcas and small boats sailing in the Strait of Gibraltar, according to the Atlantic Orca Working Group.
Metro.co.uk recently spoke to Dr Luke Rendell, who researches marine mammals, about why these attacks have increased so much.
He said that while all answers he or anyone else can give is ‘speculation’, he believes it is a ‘temporary fad’, after observing ‘multiple accounts of single and groups of orcas developing idiosyncratic and not obviously adaptive habits’.
The University of St Andrews academic added: ‘This behaviour probably started with individual orcas, but would appear to spread through social learning.
‘We recently published a paper on a similar fad-like behaviour in bottlenose dolphins, where we identified the dolphin that promoted a tail-walking behaviour it had acquired during a temporary period of captivity.’
More: Trending
Spain’s Ministry for Environment has unveiled a new GPS tagging scheme where a ‘non-invasive device’ is embedded in a killer whale’s dorsal fin.
The idea is that whale pods can be tracked and mapped weekly so sailors can be aware of where they are and avoid those areas, Spain’s expat newspaper Olive Press reports.
So far, one orca has already been tagged while six whales which have been identified as previously interacting with boats, are set to be next.
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The captain believes the pod of five killer whales were actually playing with his boat’s rudders.
