Why killer whales won’t stop ramming boats in Spain

When Daniel Kriz saw a pair of killer whales underneath his boat while crossing the Strait of Gibraltar in April, he thought: “Not again.” For Kriz, a veteran skipper who was delivering a racing catamaran across the Atlantic, it was the second such encounter in three years, after a pod of orca had surrounded and disabled his boat in 2020.

“We were suddenly surprised by what felt like a bad wave from the side,” he said of the recent incident. “That happened twice, and the second time we realized that we had two orca underneath the boat, biting the rudder off. They were two juveniles, and the adults were cruising around, and it seemed to me like they were monitoring that action.”

The four people on board the vessel didn’t suffer any injuries, but without full control of the boat, Kriz had to reach the nearest marina using only his engines. The whales had destroyed both rudders in what seemed like a streamlined version of the encounter that occurred three years prior. – Full report