Do orcas bite? 

It is hard to believe that once I make landfall in Gibraltar that I will have been aboard or underway with Pandora for more than 2 ½ months, beginning when I left Trinidad on May 4^th.  Along the way I visited more than a dozen countries, made crew changes 4 times, 5 if you count Brenda, sailed with a total of 8 individual crew members covering 4,500 nautical miles. 

Just for fun, down below when Pandora is rigged for a nighttime run.

And all that sailing included more “fixing broken stuff” along the way, than I want to think about.  And who can forget the root canal I had done in St Marten? 

With about half of the 1,000 miles from the Azores to Gibraltar under our keel, my thoughts turn to the “last mile “where we will possibly encounter the dreaded orca.

I have written a good deal about the orca menace and their attacks on pleasure boats along the coast of Portugal and the waters around Gibraltar and am very focused on trying to avoid becoming a statistic.   

For the last few years there have been many incidents where orcas bit/broke off the rudders of cruising sailboats, rammed the hull and in a few cases, sunk boats.

There are several websites focused on chronicling these incidents including www.orcas.pt.  On that site you can select a time period and see how many sightings and attacks there are in any given area.

This image shows a years’ worth of sightings for 2024 (in blue) and “incidents” (in red). Yikes!

Incidents in July and August of last year.  Still a lot… but mostly up north.

Looking at just the last three weeks, sightings and incidents.  Not so much.  I am encouraged.

And finally, hits on boats in the last three weeks. Not terrible, unless it’s you…

Having personally met two skippers over the winter that were attacked certainly brings home the scale of the risk.

Nobody really knows why orcas hit sailboat rudders but the leading theory is that the are doing this for sport and that the number of orcas involved in this sort of behavior is quite limited. 

There is also evidence that this behavior is being “taught” by a small number of adult females.  Yet another example of bad behavior among young males being encouraged by women. Just sayin…

The primary food source of orcas in this area is tuna and a leading theory is that the matriarch is encouraging juveniles and adolescents to “practice” catching tuna by going after the rudders of boats.

Early in the spring the risk of attack in the area near Gibraltar and southern Portugal is at it’s peak but as the season progresses, many of the orcas move north, following the tuna, up the coast of Portugal so the threat on the south coast of Portugal and near Gibraltar is less during the summer months.

Additionally, most reports of sightings are near the southern coast of Portugal and less far offshore between Portugal and Morocco.  That area, about 100 miles from shore is also where the commercial shipping lanes are located and my plan is to transit that area. 

Much advice is shared on Facebook and other resources on how to deter attacks such as sticking a metal pole in the water and hitting it with a hammer.  Dumping gasoline over the side, tossing sand in their path and even tossing big firecrackers into the water.

One of the most popular though is to tow an acoustic device that is supposed to repel them.  Sadly, the one that I ordered never arrived in the Azores before I departed.   I have written all about this but alas, I will never know if it would have worked.

Of course, none of the active approaches that involve deterring them will work unless you can see them coming and it is not uncommon for them to hit the boat before the crew is even aware that they are in the area, especially in the dark.

I heard of one report recently where the boat was hit so hard that it turned 360 degrees in its own length and many “victims” have reported steering linkages being broken.   It is advised to disengage the autopilot, turn on the engine and go as fast as possible away from them but also being careful to release the wheel so as not to be injured when it is yanked violently. 

It is hard to comprehend the power of one of these animals that weigh thousands of pounds.

If my steering gear is damaged, I have an emergency tiller that will allow me to steer the boat and I also had an auxiliary tiller fabricated for my wind vane steering as a backup of a backup.   

This whole thing is quite unsettling and all I can hope is that we are not one of the unlucky few that sustain real damage and that we can pass through the area with a minimum of fuss.

So, here we are, half of the way to our destination and as I noted in a recent post, “everything on a cruising boat is broken, you just don’t know it yet.”  I sure hope that does not include my rudder at the hands, or should I say mouth, of an excited adolescent orca.

So, to the question of “do orcas bite?” the answer, sadly is yes.  But for me, the real question is if they will bite Pandora. 

Oh, I sure hope not…

Details to come…