A great fright for the crew of a Swiss sailboat. During the night of last Thursday to Friday, the “Alboran Champagne” was attacked by three killer whales while en route from Tenerife to Benalmadena, in southern Spain.
It all started shortly before Gibraltar. The four people on board began to hear “creaks”. “At first I thought we had hit something. But then I quickly understood that it was killer whales attacking the boat”, confided to “Yacht.de” Werner Schaufelberger, the skipper from the Zurich Oberland.
After shutting down the boat’s engine, he contacted the Spanish Coast Guard who advised them to keep calm. The orcs continued their attacks. “It was brutal, continues Werner Schaufelberger, there was a large killer whale and two smaller ones”. The largest has multiplied the attacks “full force from the side”.
The attacks continued for almost an hour and a half. And the sailboat was starting to give way since two holes were made on the side of the rudder. Upon discovering water infiltration, the crew urgently sealed one of the breaches.
About 20 minutes after the leak, the Coast Guard arrived. They accommodated the four people on their boat and proceeded to tow the sailboat. If the crew escapes unscathed, the sailboat was not so lucky: it sank in the Mediterranean, shortly before arriving at the rescue port.
“A social game”
“There has been an upsurge in interactions between orcas with pleasure boats since 2020 and in an area that extends from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Bay of Biscay via Galicia. They exclusively target sailboats. They approach it to play with the rudder by hitting with their heads and end up breaking the hull”, noted Paula Mendez-Fernandez, marine biologist at the Pelagis observatory (La Rochelle, France) interviewed by “TF1info” after an attack of orcas in the north of Portugal in November 2022.
And if several hypotheses can explain these attacks, “the most probable is that it is about a social game which they learned. Killer whales are extremely intelligent cetaceans with an ability to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next,” continues the researcher. A hypothesis that tends to be confirmed by the fact that young killer whales are often seen during these attacks. It could also be a way for animals to show that they are disturbed by the presence of humans.
