No yacht is a match for a whale

How likely – really – is your yacht to collide with a whale? Yachting World reports on a new approach to reduce the chance of whale strikes, plus what sailors can do.

“When a 45-tonnes Sperm Whale is on starboard tack, it has right of way. It also has right of way when it’s on port tack!” the legendary French ocean sailor Olivier de Kersauson once said.

Few would argue with him, and no yacht is a match for a whale. Thanks to the vulnerability of rudders, keels, rudder posts or even foils, the spectre of crashing into a large, solid sea creature in deep water has haunted seafarers long before Moby Dick was written in 1851.

For years, reported incidents of cruising yachts colliding with whales were so rare that the risk was supposed to be vanishingly unlikely. The only sailors that did seem to regularly report collisions were ocean racers. Many of those accounts were unclear if they’d hit a whale, a sunfish, a submerged container, or if the carbon boats had simply suffered structural failure. – Full report