Orcas !

The calm before the killer whale storm a couple hundred miles from the dreaded straights of Gibraltar.

I have been scared sailing in the past, but the source of fear is generally forecastable: the wind, the waves, the weather. The swell is 8m and we’re surfing down the back of waves at 15 knots, one foul move, a wave crashes over the deck and you’ve broached. Or the wind is blowing too strongly and the bare-poled boat races precariously. Or the most frightening, lightning crashing all around. To some extent, weather related fears are controllable. You can reef the sails, or pull in somewhere to ride out a storm. You always have the knowledge that boats are strong and that a person will be afraid much before the boat is even struggling. Never have I feared what’s beneath the water. The kraken is fiction. But at 2153 a horrible thud sent my heart racing and I was shaking with fear. Sailors everywhere are talking about orcas attacking rudders and sinking boats within minutes and it had certainly been on our minds for the past week. Reports of deterring them go from throwing sand, washing up liquid or diesel in the water, to firing a flare at them or banging a metal stick in the water. The official advice is to avoid the area, hard to do when the only other way into the Mediterranean is through the Suez Canal. Coming into the Gibraltar straight an orca charged into the hull twice, before it jumped a metre in the air beside the boat and disappeared. The loud thud that sent shudders through the boat followed by the shape of a fat dolphin was enough to scare us shitless.

You’ve sort of got to wonder why they do it. Why is this one particular pod around Portugal attacking sailing boats? Do they get any enjoyment from ramming head first into really quite a hard object? It must hurt and doesn’t seem like much fun to me. But if the goal is to scare people, bloody good job mate. I shat myself.

But we got away with it, no water streaming into the boat or loss of steering after meticulously checking the bilges and moving the rudder. Nothing, no damage. Even a swim to check the hull the following day didn’t reveal an orca face print in our antifoul. But the six of us on deck in life jackets in the pitch black scanning the water for fins for 3 hours, terrified and ready to abandon ship, is something I never want to experience again. I was shaking and ready to get into the life raft.

I awoke from sleep the next morning after a fitful night and it felt as though it were all a dream. We motored on a glassy Mediterranean sea, escorted in safety by dolphins and pilot whales.