A group of orcas recently nearly sank another sailboat in the Strait of Gibraltar and followed the vessel all the way to port — marking the first-known case of the killer whales stalking a boat after destroying its rudder.
"They didn't leave after the rudder was removed," April Boyes, an experienced sailor who was aboard the Mustique, told Live Science in a message on social media. The crew first spotted the orcas around 9:30 p.m. local time as they were sailing through the Strait of Gibraltar."It didn't take long for them to start hitting our rudder and the force of this would spin the helm violently and you could feel the vibration through the deck," Boyes wrote in a blog post.
Experts with the GTOA, who have been keeping track of the unusual encounters between orcas and boats off the Iberian coast, declined to comment on whether the new behavior of pursuing the battered boat signified a shift in the orcas' strategy. "Thanks to the GPS of the killer whales and prediction models, we have some variables that allow us to predict where these animals are going to be," Renaud de Stephanis, the president of CIRCE, told the Spanish broadcaster RTVE."100% of the attacks that have occurred since March until now could have been prevented simply by people being informed."