Research library on orca interactions

While the year 2020 will largely be defined by the pandemic which impacted the world, it was also a time when the scientific community became baffled by incidents of orcas ramming sailing boats along the Spanish and Portuguese coasts.

These conflicts continue to grab headlines, particularly when the final leg of The Ocean Race passed through an area notorious for orca and two VO65s had direct encounters with the killer whales.

Hoping to find answers, the Cruising Association – acknowledged as the leading organization for sail and motor cruisers – launched an orca project in June 2022 and have received around 150 reports from skippers who have experienced an orca interaction.

The CA has now created a library of comments extracted from the full interaction reports, categorizing the different actions and measures that skippers have reported when attempting to deter or end an interaction.

This resource aims to provide an easily accessible way to research the effectiveness of skipper actions based on evidence from first-hand accounts.

The library is categorised by actions, including use of noise, use of sand, continuing to sail or motor, reversing and other measures. It is available to read at www.theca.org.uk/orcas/interaction-deterrent-library/

Every individual skipper interaction report is publicly viewable in full, with the new library simply extracting the specific actions taken into a user-friendly research tool. The library enables sailors, scientists, and others to review specific skipper actions and outcomes, for their own interest, research purposes and to assist in reducing interaction and damage to boats if an interaction occurs.

Each extracted report in the library contains a link to the full report, so that all other reported factors, such as sea state/wind speed, boat speed, day/night, cloud cover, distance off land, sea depth, hull/antifoul color, type of rudder, use of autopilot and depth sounder, can be reviewed if required.

The CA orca project collects and publishes a wide range of data from interaction reports along with comparative data of interaction reports compared against reports from yachts sailing without incident through the affected area (an ‘uneventful passage’).

The CA library will be updated as new interaction reports are received. To submit reports to the CA orca project website for both an ‘interaction’ and an ‘uneventful passage’, click here.