ORCA proof Yachts now Required

" Here recently, an encounter with a pod of 7 orcas resulted in the sinking of a yacht. A French Benetau Oceanis 393 was recently sunk 14 miles off the coast of Portugal.

After about 45 minutes of bumping and biting at the boat the crew heard a loud noise as the boat cracked and began taking on water. ....
While there have been reported over 200 attacks as highlighted by the following article, this is not the first sinking caused by orcas. . The following article highlights a similar incident occurring months earlier that resulted in a yacht sinking by orcas followed by a subsequent attack on another boat the same day. "

Orca Encounters Now Sinking Boats - New Learned Behavior ? - For Scuba Divers https://forscubadivers.com/ocean-conservation/orca-encounters-now-sinking-boats-new-learned-behavior/?fbclid=IwAR357vHFf2iB4PKC2aHocWvzAkVoD8L4DnJVHNi-A817H6RzHF2KEd3BMus

Imagine if ALL Orcas around the world learned this behaviour ...

 

Gotta wonder if a member of the pod had a prop encounter and decides the ship is alive.

It seems of little value to the orca to become aggressive toward the ship for no reason.

Also, 14 miles offshore; seems the boat could have headed to shore and maybe prevented catastrophe. So, some vigilance seems wise.

 

We forget our ancestors weren't nearly as stupid as modern times tries to paint them. There is a reason for the slang term of "killer whales". They are a shockingly effective and efficient predator, devoid of the nobility we've transposed upon them. Not all that surprised they developed an interest in tearing up boats.

The population exploded up here about the time my teenage years started. Almost daily interactions with them on the water. I've seen them tear up big whales, we had a pod go rogue and hill a pile of humpbacks. Local biologist said they appeared to be killing just for sport and to consume the tongues. Lot of dead whales floating around that spring. Have seen them kill sea lions for sport, pod got into a batch of sea lions in the bay we fished out of. Next day we went on the beach to see the bloated carcasses, kinda amazing how big the the bite wounds were. Sea lions aren't exactly thin skinned critters.

Not sure about orca prop strikes, they move at a pretty good clip, manatees they are not...

 

I don't think heading to shore is an option. They move faster than most sailboats, and are fine in water shallower than many sailboats.

I think they are just being jerks, because they can.

 

"The yacht Smousse took on water when its keel was pulled away by orcas. It sank 20 minutes later. Fortunately, all aboard were rescued by a nearby yacht that was only 1hr away."

A longstanding theory is that boat fins - their shape, number, and arrangement - are triggers for Orca attacks. Historically, twin keel boats have had a disproportionate number of incidents. If you look at the Oceanis, it has a distinct Sheel keel or integrated keel bulb arrangement that may look a bit more biological that an ordinary fin.

Amazon.com https://www.amazon.com/Last-Voyage-Lucette-Previously-Interwoven/dp/1574092065
Maurice and Maralyn Bailey - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_and_Maralyn_Bailey

You have to wonder how many don't get found by a fishing boat in the middle of the Pacific.

Both Lucette and Auralyn had bilge keels. Auralyn shown below.

 

My theory is that the huge number of small refugee boats crossing the Mediterranean have resulted in Orcas being able to tip people out and eat them.
But, then I haven't heard of half eaten bodies being found.

But this search
"“Rough Play or Bad Intentions? Orca Encounters Off Iberia Baffle Experts”, New York Times, September 20, 2020 reports that a well known school of Orcas (killer whales) whose resident range is around both sides of the Straits of Gibraltar, have suddenly started mass attacks on small boats.

All experts interviewed by the press said there is no obvious explanation for this sudden change, but we think there is!

Orcas are very well known to attack floating ice and tip it over in order to eat polar bears, seals, walruses, etc on top of them, and there are numerous accounts of terrifying attacks on Arctic and Antarctic explorers too. Sealskin clad fishermen in small boats in Alaska and British Columbia were sometimes attacked."
Are Orcas eating Mediterranean migrants? - Global Coral Reef Alliance https://www.globalcoral.org/are-orcas-eating-mediterranean-migrants/

 

Orcas eat plenty of seals around here, and there are no half eaten seals found. They would have no problem eating whole humans, but we aren't hearing reports from survivors, so it seems unlikely.

 

Hmmm. NO Survivors ? I cant think why

 

First time you see one randomly rag doll a 1500 pound sea lion like a cat with a little toy... they are a sight to behold on the hunt.

 

I'm thinking of putting up a new website and wonder if I should offer a free design for disk-like winglets to retrofit on rudders. I don't know if they would keep an orca from biting a rudder, but they would make it more difficult for orcas to "steer" a boat as many reports have stated they do in various ways, including working in tandem on either side of the rudder. At least part of disk shaped winglets could position the outer edge a constant distance from the rudder's turning axis.

Worth a try ..?

 

In the Mediterranean, there have been boats small enough for orca to tip over for millenia. Likewise in the Arctic. In neither region is there a history of orcas hunting humans.

Orca populations also have their own feeding traditions. Here is the abstract of a paper on the subject:

From https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1748-7692.2000.tb00906.x

So residents would be unlikely to hunt humans. What I find even more reassuring is an article on scientists interviewing Inuit on the feeding habits of orcas, and those orcas are clearly mammal hunters, yet there is no mention of them hunting Inuit: What the Inuit Taught Scientists About Killer Whales | Science| Smithsonian Magazine https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-the-inuit-taught-scientists-about-killer-whales-88501052/ And if anyone would be aware whether orcas hunt humans, it would be the people who lived and hunted alongside them for millenia.

I know that some orca populations take tuna off longlines. If the Gibraltar population does the same, there is a good chance that some fisherman dropped a firework on an orca, or took pot shots, the orca found they couldn't do much against a steel fishing boat, but then tried a yacht and found it much more fragile.

One hunting tactic of mammal hunting orcas is to ram. After an orca attack on a sperm whale pod, one of the sperm whales was seen to swim off with a broken jaw. I don't know how the strength of a sperm whale jaw compares to the strength of a fibreglass hull, but I think it would take a pretty thick laminate to be stronger. So if the orca's aim were to sink boats, I expect most boats would sink within two minutes. I know of one case of a ramming attack that was not playful, against a wooden yacht on the way to the Galapagos in the 1970s, and that boat sank within about one minute. And that is why the videos of the Gibraltar orcas, even when they take seconds to break off two rudders, still look relatively playful to me.

As for shooting the orcas (Edit: the post proposing that seems to have been deleted), we play in the sea by choice. As a species, we overfish and spread both noise pollution and chemical pollution. The orcas have nowhere else to go. I think they have a better claim on the sea than we humans do, and if some of them don't want us in their home any longer, there is the option of respecting that instead of reaching for a gun.

 

Odd that the scientist would learn from the Inuit as opposed to the aleuts and the alu-tuq since the prevalence of orcas is easily 10:1 for those groups.

Having spent a tremendous amount of time in and around orca habitat, they behave different than they did 20 years ago. But that's probably due to numbers. As a kid it was a weekly sighting, now it's near daily. Either they all hang with people or numbers are way up.

In 14 -17 we has the hot blob and the ocean was perceptible empty of the hustle and bustle of marine life. Some of those years were pretty bleak, with it all marine life was a bit twitchy. When everything is hungry it changed behavior of all animals. It got cold in 18-19 and with it the trickle down effect of life from more oxygen in the water. As dead as it looked in 17 its alive now, the sheer volume of forage fish has once again changed behavior back to normal and less aggressive for predator species.

It's no different from the Bears in 2016 there were more bear attacks than I can ever remember in my entire life it was absolutely staggering. Those also the worst salmon return in 80 years, conversely 19 was one of the largest returns in the last 50 years. There's an annual photo competition for a picture of the fattest bear... 2016s winner wouldn't of placed in the top 1000 of 2019s. Those well fed fat bears didn't have a lot of negative interactions like 16'. Can't imagine orcas are much different.


Then there is the human component. Depending on where you live 90% of the world's population is more than 5 generations away from being fearful of the capacity of predators to cause harm. Coincidently we now have a generation of ****** watching free willy thinking they are little more than live stuffed animals. Idiotic behavior that doesn't recognize that these are real predators worth of being left alone seems to be the norm.

My guess is leave them well enough alone. Lightning is more likely to cause you problems then orcas...

 

It certainly IS different

"Boat captain twice ambushed by pod of orcas says "they knew exactly what they are doing"

Boat captain twice ambushed by pod of orcas says "they knew exactly what they are doing" - CBS News https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boating-captain-ambushed-orcas-they-knew-exactly-what-they-are-doing/?ftag=CNM-00-10aab6a&linkId=219461299&fbclid=IwAR1CVJACIrbETfGkIZybN1zxAj2wib6xf8zd3ox5X1Xw6boM7Grdmzolbik

 

In my youth halibut was at its last apex (17-19 year cycles) and we fished a lot of it. The whales got really good at cleaning them off our hooks, especially so west of unimak. The problem got bad enough we spent a lot of time with the area marine biologists trying to figure out a solution. It's not good for the fish, whales or fisherman for them to harvest fish of the line (think not feeding bears).

We tried the acoustic counter measures but they developed a tolerance within days, then we switched to seal bombs that are essentially high quality m80s to spook them away. They were so smart we had on big bull that had a scare above his eye that looked like it was caused by teet of another ehale that made him rather rough looking (we had nicknames for some of the frequent flyer whales, but more on got censored in my last post, his nickname was coarse by fisherman standards.) He would glide next to the boat about 10 feet under the water just looking at me. He'd see fish before I would and dissappear into the dark. Few seconds later I'd pull a hook with nothing but a fish head on it and he would re appear perfectly parallel to the rail cut awaiting the next one, that big ol scar eye just looking at me.

I'd ligh the seal bomb to spook him away, but eventually he got smart enough if I light one where he could see he'd swim away and return as soon as it went bang. The biologists gave us all manner of stuff to try. Our only conclusion was of the device scared us it scared them but otherwise they figured it out in a matter of hrs.

We ended up changing up our style if fishing, it was less efficient but mitigated loss and was way safer for both parties.

Suffice to say they are cagey little boogers for sure, but if one attacked my sailboat both times I went through an area I'd stay out of that area.... or take up a shore based hobby.

 

Hello Everybody!
Are there Informations available if the constant use of Depth Sounders, which is normal today and unusual a few years ago, is responsable for the "interest" of Orcas for Sailboats? A few years ago we started the Depth Sounder just for the navigation in shallow waters. Today we start it with the activation of the nav station.

Have fun, Michel