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Tourists in a sailboat view an orca which rises above the water in the Strait of Juan de Fuca between north coastal Washington and Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
(Photo: Stuart Westmorland/Getty)
Tourists in a sailboat view an orca which rises above the water in the Strait of Juan de Fuca between north coastal Washington and Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
Tourists in a sailboat view an orca which rises above the water in the Strait of Juan de Fuca between north coastal Washington and Vancouver Island, British Columbia. (Photo: Stuart Westmorland/Getty)

Navigating Orca Alley: One Family’s Journey Among Rudder-Bashing Whales

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We’ve always been thrilled to see orcas near our home in Alaska. But sailing through the waters along the Iberian Peninsula, where 600 boats have been hit—and five sunk—by whales, was unnerving at best.

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We landed awkwardly on a wave and the boat shuddered, our aluminum hull protesting loudly under the impact. Seconds later, I felt another violent thud and immediately feared the worst—orcas! Foghorn in hand, I readied myself to wake the rest of the crew, reciting our response plan in my mind. Noisemakers, full revs to shallower water, radio call, check the bilges. Run like hell and hope they lose interest!

But I hesitated in the intervening silence. After many days underway with relatively little sleep, I knew my nerves were raw, my internal radar struggling to decipher clutter from true danger. I forced myself to count to ten. Breathe, listen, wait. The usual sounds resumed. Water rushing beside us. Gulls calling hoarsely in the dark. Wind whistling against the halyards. No 8,000-pound whale body-slamming our boat. At least not yet.

It was 2 A.M., and I was on night watch 15 miles off the west coast of Portugal, feeling anything but at home on the sea. Familiar constellations offered reassurance that we hadn’t sailed off the edge of the earth, while the wildly tilting horizon suggested otherwise, making Orion dance like a jester. It was mid-November during a new moon, the sea black besides occasional phosphorescence rising in our wake.

We rode easily over the ten-foot swell that lingered from an earlier storm, but the west wind had begun to kick up an unpleasant chop with short, sharp waves whose crests looked eerily like orca fins. Alone on deck, my mind wandered to worst-case scenarios. I pictured my seven- and nine-year-old sons, Dawson and Huxley, being shaken from sleep as my husband, Pat, sprinted up on deck in his underwear to find that we had been struck by an orca.

Most unsettling of all was the unwelcome reconfiguration of my relationship to the natural world: suddenly, I was afraid of a creature I’d long regarded as friend. As a wildlife biologist in Alaska, I’ve worked in the company of orcas; as a sailor, I’ve celebrated each surprise sighting at sea; as a mother, I’ve reveled in my sons’ fascination with them.

But now, rather than being graced by the presence of whales, I was worried we’d be taken down by them.

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An orca bumps the rudder of a 65-foot racing yacht near the Strait of Gilbraltar during the final leg of the Ocean Race Vo 65 Sprint Cup, an around-the-world sailing competition, in June 2023. The whales have been attracted to sailboat rudders for reasons still unknown. (Photo: Team JAJO / The Ocean Race)

Along the Iberian Peninsula, where the North Atlantic collides with the rugged coastlines of Spain and Portugal before pinching into the Mediterranean Sea, an endangered subpopulation of orcas has developed the unfortunate habit of ramming into sailboats. The powerful animals target the rudders, often breaking them and destroying or disabling a boat’s steering. Such force can sometimes also damage a boat’s hull and cause a leak.

Orcas, also called killer whales (Orcinus orca), are known for their prowess as marine predators, and they’re intelligent and highly social. Across their global range, they’re unusually flexible in what they eat, how they hunt, and where they call home. Among their many talents, they’re masters of surprise.

Since May 2020, when the first incidents were recorded, around 600 sailboats in the region have been hit, and at least five of these have sunk. There have been about 40 attacks this summer so far. An encounter in May off the northwestern coast of Morocco marked the first sinking of 2024, the crew of two rescued by a nearby tanker after the 50-foot boat began rapidly taking on water.

Although interactions have been recorded in every month of the year, most have occurred during summer, when both sailboats and orcas are more likely to be in the area. As the sailing season has come into full swing again, the orcas are back, and apparently ready to rumble.

A relatively small number of whales are responsible for all the fuss—an estimated 50 animals make up the Iberian subpopulation, with fewer individuals actually implicated in the incidents.

For me, sailing through what has been dubbed Orca Alley with my family during late fall last year, a previously abstract problem had become intensely personal. Alongside my husband, sons, and a friend from Alaska named Kevin who had volunteered to join us for this leg, I was no longer a curious bystander or a wildlife biologist at work but a sailor in the hot zone.

Aboard Turnstone, our 43-foot aluminum-hulled cutter, I was en route with my family from Greece to Greenland, part of a multiyear journey that would take us through the Mediterranean and North Atlantic before veering toward our home waters of Alaska.

We aren’t new to sailing, or to meetings with orcas. Pat and I lived aboard our first sailboat almost two decades ago. Our sons were toddlers when their own sailing adventures began, and they’ve grown up with the ocean as their backyard and whales as their neighbors. We’re used to navigating risk outdoors as a family—when we’re not at sea, we backcountry ski, commute by skiff, and live with grizzlies in our region. We’ve sailed peacefully alongside orcas on many other occasions.

Nonetheless, the situation we faced in the Mediterranean was unfamiliar and unnerving.

On the nearly 1,400-mile, four-week Iberian Peninsula leg of our journey—along the coasts of Spain and Portugal and across the formidable Bay of Biscay—orcas would dictate when and how we moved. The animals’ specific whereabouts remain unknown until confirmed by a sighting or closer encounter. What’s considered a safe zone one week could be an orca playground the next. For sailors, unlucky timing might mean the difference between a smooth passage and a voyage’s end.

Map of orca locations, illustration
The author and her family's sailing route from Greece to Scotland (Illustration: Erin Douglas)

For weeks it had felt like we’d been living backstage in a reality show, with events unfolding in frighteningly real time. Since leaving Greece in early September, I’d been following the status of the Iberian orcas carefully, knowing that our time to cross into their territory was quickly approaching. As we sailed west, the number of attacks steadily increased and the odds of an encounter in the area seemed uncomfortably high.

On Halloween night, while we celebrated Dia de las Brujas in Santa Pola, Spain, a Polish boat named Grazie Mamma made its final sail. The 43-foot vessel, with its seasoned crew of six, was struck by several orcas near Tangier, Morocco. Despite all efforts of the crew and the Moroccan navy to save the boat, it sank before it could be towed to the nearest harbor. It was the fourth orca-related sinking, and the second one of 2023. It was just one of eight orca attacks in the area to come in roughly as many days.

As we rounded the corner of southeastern Spain a week later, we knew we were headed directly into an orca hot spot.

One evening, Pat and I were on deck after the boys had gone to bed, staying up well past midnight to check weather, plan our route for the coming days, and talk orcas. We’d dropped anchor in a small cove after a sunset sail on flat seas punctuated only by a pod of spinner dolphins riding our bow. As placid as the day had been, our mood was tense: the next morning, we’d round into the Strait of Gibraltar, where much of the recent orca activity had taken place.

“Is it crazy to continue?” I asked. It was a question I’d gone over in my mind a hundred times before.

“I don’t see many alternatives,” Pat answered. Illuminated by the glare of my headlamp, his blue eyes shone intensely from under his sweatshirt hood.

We’d spent many hours worrying over the decision to transit this area, which is the only maritime exit from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. We’d considered other options for going north, including crossing France through a series of inland canals or waiting until the orca activity had diminished, but for many reasons neither of these seemed tenable.

“It’s hard to know if it’s like dealing with bears in Alaska—a risk but not an unreasonable one,” Pat said. “What are the actual chances of getting hit?”

“No one knows. That’s the problem,” I said.

As a researcher, I tend to be fact-driven. With the orcas, I was intent on gathering all available data to make an informed decision. I’d spent an absurd number of hours tracking reports and references online and trying to collate these into a semblance of an answer, to little avail.

Pat, while deferential to expert advice, was less apt to wait for all the information before acting. To his credit, such an approach can provide an easy excuse to never go anywhere.

After several more rounds of circular reasoning, our conversation lapsed into silence, with a tacit agreement taking the place of words. As we had for the previous two months of our trip, we’d continue to take it one day at a time. The deck felt cool against my bare feet as I leaned against the rail and looked up, searching for clarity in the dark sky.

A picture taken on May 31, 2023 shows the rudder of a ship damaged by killer whales (Orcinus orca) while sailing in the Strait of Gibraltar and taken for repairs at the Pecci Shipyards in Barbate, near Cadiz, southern Spain.
This photo shows the rudder of a ship damaged by orcas while sailing in the Strait of Gibraltar. Once a rudder has been disabled, the boat can no longer be steered. (Photo: Jorge Guerrero/AFP/Getty)

Another encounter occurred just as we arrived at the port of Gibraltar for a resupply. On November 7, Australian sailors Eugenie Alder and her husband, Paul Alder, set off across the Strait of Gibraltar on Deo Juvante, their 62-foot catamaran. They’d left Spain early that morning with a convoy of six other boats, seeking safety in numbers. Orcas had been sighted in the strait, but Eugenie reasoned that a direct route would minimize their time in the orca zone while also allowing them to catch favorable winds to the Canary Islands.

With more than 22,000 ocean miles under her belt, Eugenie knew orcas weren’t the only factor to consider when planning a transatlantic passage. They’d been waiting several weeks for a suitable weather window to make their crossing; fall storms had begun to stack up and the clock was ticking.

At ten in the morning, three and a half miles from the Moroccan coast, Eugenie spotted two groups of fins in the distance. Minutes later, she felt the first impact, which she described to me as “taking a huge wave on the beam, or being rammed by a floating bulldozer.” An orca had hit them on the starboard side, knocking their 36-ton boat 90 degrees off course.

Eugenie immediately disabled the autopilot in hopes of reducing damage to the steering components, throttled up the engine, and called on the radio to alert other boats in the convoy that they’d been hit.

After swapping with her husband at the helm, she ran below to check for leaks. Following advice from other sailors’ experiences, she switched on the stereo and turned up the volume in both hulls—unfamiliar underwater sounds like music have been proposed as a possible short-term orca deterrent—but perhaps not quickly enough. Another blow came shortly after from the port side, followed by a powerful shove from behind.

“I saw the third one up close. When I looked out the stern porthole, there was a huge black body and tall dorsal fin right there. It was practically on top of us.”

As the “2023 Party Mix” she’d turned on blasted from the speakers, Eugenie watched the orca swim away from Deo Juvante, heading straight for a 43-foot catamaran sailing closely behind them.

“Everything felt exaggerated,” she said. “The noise of the engine at high revs, the music, the orca up close, the adrenaline.”

I’d met Eugenie online. We are both members of , an active and relatively tight-knit group of sailors, researchers, and others interested in minimizing sailboat-orca interactions. Organized by Rui Alves in 2022, the online group has grown in popularity among sailors for providing real-time updates on orca whereabouts. Working with Dr. Renaud de Stephanis from CIRCE, a marine-mammal research organization based in El Pelayo, Spain, and other partners, Alves merges scientific information with live reports to help inform sailors and prevent orca conflicts.

Before the Alders’ crossing, I’d been following their route planning via an orcas.pt Telegram chat. I saw Eugenie’s morning message indicating the group’s departure. Several hours later I read her post in horror: “Orcas in the strait we were hit 3 times not sure if any damage.”

𲹳, Deo Juvante hit three times.”

Alves helped relay the information to orcas.pt members, clarifying where and when the encounter had occurred, while De Stephanis piped in a moment later: “Avoid the area where they are!!! You were just in their kitchen Eugenie,” he said. “Go close [to] the shore.”

“Hopefully we’re going out the front door now. Running as fast as we can,” Eugenie answered.

Deo Juvante and the other boats in the convoy were traveling so quickly toward shore that they aroused the interest of the harbormaster at Port Tanger Med II, who called by VHF to ask if they were part of a sailing race.

In the end, the Alders were among the lucky ones; there was no major damage to their boat and they were able to continue their passage to the Canaries, then across to the Caribbean. The catamaran sailing immediately behind them was also hit but reportedly sustained only minimal damage after being “roughed about a bit,” as Eugenie described it.

The other boats in their convoy revved their engines, played loud music, and threw sand into the water—tricks thought to interfere with an orca’s ability to “see” the boat via echolocation. They all escaped without contact, though at least one boat’s crew had been so shaken that, once they reached Morocco, they stopped for the season, abandoning their plans to continue across the Atlantic.

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A map provided to Caroline Van Hemert by orcas.pt, an organization created by Rui Alves that is helping to track and prevent orca encounters with sailors. The star on the map is where the author's boat was at the time. (Photo: Rui Alves at www.orcas.pt)

Mitigating risk is a familiar exercise for sailors. It’s what we do each time we read the marine weather forecast and plan a passage; it’s what keeps us safe in a constantly changing environment. We know we must abide by the rules of the sea: Expect the unexpected. Allow a little extra sea room around each headland; carry a spare set of charts; look for a weather window with a buffer; know where you can run if all else fails. 

After spending much of my adult life on sailboats, skiffs, rowboats, kayaks, and fishing boats, I have a deep respect for the power and unpredictability of the ocean.

A skipper doesn’t have survival suits and life rafts on board because she intends to use them but because even the most careful preparations carry with them a certain margin of error. Alves makes this point often in the orcas.pt forum: “There is no zero risk, and each skipper must decide what is best for their boat and their crew.”

It also never hurts to have luck on your side. So when a post from Alves said to pray to Neptune and throw some rum into the sea, I did it.

Simply avoiding the risk area might sound plausible from a distance, but it spans a large portion of the North Atlantic, including the single route in and out of the Mediterranean Sea. And unlike travel by air or road, nothing happens fast on a sailboat.

Waiting it out also brings up concerns about weather windows and visas running out. And there is a clear hypocrisy in telling live-aboard sailors to go home when, for many, the boats are their homes. Some insurance policies will cover orca-induced repairs but others, including ours, explicitly exclude such incidents, meaning that there is no financial recourse if a boat is severely damaged or sunk.

As a biologist, with two decades of experience studying species from chickadees to polar bears, I’m usually inclined to take the side of wildlife, aware that it’s too often human folly that leads to bad outcomes. But with orcas, I struggled to make sense of their behavior and decide how to mitigate the risk of a negative encounter. With bears there are well-founded avoidance strategies and reassuring statistics to lean on—in Alaska, a person is more likely to die from a dog bite or a bicycle accident than a bear attack.

But as the numbers of orca-sailboat conflicts skyrocketed, and the guidelines for safe passage seemed increasingly contradictory, I found little comfort in statistics.

One of the biggest challenges for sailors trying to avoid encounters is the lack of clear and well-supported guidance. There is no daily orca forecast, no reliable green light/red light system for passage making. In the end, I came to rely primarily on the orcas.pt maps and messaging groups, which offer real-time updates, measured advice, and a moderator whose tone strikes an impressively diplomatic balance between respect for whales and respect for sailors.

Alves is the first to acknowledge the limitations of trying to track orcas or to predict where attacks might occur. But some information is much better than none, and his good-faith effort to inform the parties with the most at stake has been well received. “My focus is to find solutions that permit orcas and sailors to share this beautiful place that is the sea,” Alves told me. “It is good for the sailors, and it is good for the orcas.”

In October 2023, the internationally renowned German sailing organization Trans-Ocean e.V. recognized Alves and De Stephanis for their work with an Ocean Award.

We followed the practical advice orcas.pt offered, which was to run as close to shore as possible, based on evidence that encounters are unlikely at depths of less than 65 feet. Shallow waters are generally the bane of sailors, who seek safety, and wind, offshore. But in this part of the world, so are orcas.

Shortly before we left Gibraltar, we learned about several other boats berthed nearby that were awaiting repairs from earlier orca incidents, reminding us of the hazards that waited just beyond the harbor entrance.

Swapping one set of risks for another, we clawed our way along the coast of southern Spain, navigating reefs and poorly marked fishing gear as we attempted to avoid becoming another orca statistic. Each time we saw an imposing Salvamento Maritimo ship, carrying Spanish search-and-rescue crews that have responded to and towed dozens of orca-damaged boats to safety over the past several years, we wondered where the next incident might occur.

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Left: Caroline Van Hemert with her sons, Dawson and Huxley, on Turnstone, their family's expedition sailboat. (Photo: Patrick Farrell) Right: Patrick Farrell, the author's husband, navigating the start of Orca Alley in southern Spain. (Photo: Caroline Van Hemert)
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In mid-November, after making it out of the Strait of Gibraltar safely, we rounded the southwestern corner of Portugal into the full force of the North Atlantic. We hoped we’d lessened our chances of orca encounters. Not because they didn’t regularly occur here—there had already been 15 attacks in the area that season and many more sightings—but because most of the orcas seemed to be busy chasing tuna, and sailboat rudders, elsewhere. All of the recent action had been recorded in the Strait of Gibraltar and along the coast of North Africa, the latter of which marked a southern range extension for such encounters.

Like most highly mobile predators, orcas aren’t known to stay put for long. Along the Iberian Peninsula, their movements typically follow those of bluefin tuna, which compose the bulk of their diet. Like their prey, orcas can travel at impressive speeds, with sustained swimming rates of more than eight miles per hour. Iberian orcas have also learned to capitalize on the relatively easy offerings of the tuna-fishing fleet, with a portion of their summertime feedings thought to come from plucking fish off of longlines.

Trying to track the movements of marine mammals is always challenging; throw a climate curveball in the mix and all bets are off. In the North Atlantic, 2023 was a staggeringly hot year, and 2024 is shaping up to be the same. Such changes mean that both predators and prey are likely to move beyond their historic ranges. The bottom line is that orcas follow the food, wherever it may take them.

After a weeklong period of relative quiet on the Iberian front, the orcas.pt live map of sightings and attacks flashed red again, and it showed a point nearly on top of us. A boat had just been hit near Sesimbra, Portugal, a small coastal port where we’d considered stopping for the night.

Elaine Summers was sailing with her husband and ten- and twelve-year-old sons on their boat Kendra when she heard a call on the radio about an orca attack nearby. She posted immediately to the orcas.pt site to alert other sailors in the area. I saw the message pop up with coordinates that made the skin on my neck crawl. The encounter had occurred just a few miles from our current position.

Like Kendra, the boat that had been hit was heading south, following our route in reverse. We’d sailed within a few hundred yards of each other just hours earlier, waving greetings from our cockpits.

On the afternoon of November 13, Stephan Tromp, skipper of Modus Vivendi, saw a tall, pointed dorsal fin a hundred yards away, moving parallel to his sailboat. The whale then made an abrupt 90-degree turn and, seconds later, collided with the boat on its starboard side.

“It looked like the orca tried to steer the boat,” he told me, “but because we have hydraulic steering the boat kept course.”

Tromp suspected the orca had intentionally targeted the rudder, a behavior that’s been reported in other attacks. When he dove down later to inspect for damage he saw bottom paint missing. As he wrote to me: “The whale knew what to do to damage the rudder because it hit the bottom 20cm,” presumably where the leverage on the rudder would be greatest. Tromp was fortunate that he had been relatively close to a harbor when the attack occurred; he was able to motor quickly toward shallower water and the interaction stopped.

This was the first encounter in this area in more than a month, and unwelcome news for all of us. The orcas were back.

As information about the encounter streamed in, Pat and I faced another decision point: sail on into the night, in hopes of passing out of the orcas’ current playground as quickly as possible, or take shelter and face the same problem the next day, lengthening our time of exposure to orcas and other coastal hazards.

Hugging the shore at the recommended 65-foot depth would be unwise in the dark under any conditions, and tonight was especially unsafe given the current sea state. Through binoculars, the sea spray I saw high on the cliffs gave a clear message: Stay away!

We were on a stretch of coastline notorious for its difficult-to-enter harbors and fierce surf breaks, such as the one at Nazare where the HBO series 100 Foot Wave was filmed. Terrifying video footage of what can happen when one ventures too close to a lee shore on a rough day had been circulating recently among the sailing community. In it, the mast of a sailboat swings wildly back and forth, the wind pushing the hull sideways, waves pummeling the keel until there’s nowhere left to go except onto the beach.

Sadly, the four Austrian sailors on the boat died in this incident, near Peniche, Portugal, in early November, a sobering reminder that certain seafaring rules must be respected.

As the sun began to slide below the wavering horizon, the tone on deck took on a heightened sense of urgency. While our friend Kevin entertained the boys below with Legos, Pat and I discussed our options.

“I don’t want to invite an attack, but it seems too late to change course now,” I said.

“Yeah, there are orcas out here somewhere, but breaking waves are a whole different animal to contend with,” Pat said. “I can’t see going anywhere near that coastline right now.”

Given the risks, there seemed to be only one reasonable option: we’d take a gamble with the orcas and sail far offshore. This meant that our current route would become a multiday passage, so Kevin, Pat, and I began regular four-hour watch rotations, with sleep, meals, and kid time squeezed into the margins.

Between checking instruments and adjusting sails, I filled the long hours in the cockpit thinking about our family’s relationship to orcas. Unlike many of the sailors we met in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic, orcas weren’t strangers to us. I’d struggled with how to speak to my sons about this hazard. I didn’t want my fear or the recent media coverage to sour the magic of being in the company of whales.

Our family has been fortunate to see orcas dozens of times, from shore and at sea, in summer and winter, while traveling and at home. I recalled one cold December day five years earlier when my then two-year-old son called out “black ducks” from our front porch in Alaska; I turned to see six pointed fins rise in formation. He clapped and danced at the sight.

Even when they’re not immediately in our periphery, orcas have tended to linger somewhere nearby. They’re the mascot of my children’s elementary school and my alma mater. We have among our collective belongings a giant stuffed orca, an orca mug, orca earrings, orca-print sweatshirts, orca wall art, several orca school reports, and more orca memories than I can count. Orcas have long felt like a part of the family.

For a parent, there’s no easy way to juggle the challenges of an unconventional lifestyle with the reward of seeing the world up close. I don’t want to put my children at unnecessary risk, nor do I want them to grow up fearing the unknown. The orcas presented one of many such dilemmas that we face while living on our boat or off-grid in Alaska: how do we protect ourselves from the world while also embracing its wonders?

As we dodged orcas along the Iberian Peninsula, my younger son was reading A Whale of the Wild, a grade-school novel about a pod of orcas living in the Salish Sea in British Columbia. I’d come off night watch to find him asleep in his bunk, blond hair spread behind him, book open on his bare chest. To this day, he claims orcas to be his favorite animal.

For two more long weeks, until the last darkening days of November, we juggled the relative risks of weather and whales, staying or going, crossing the 350-mile Bay of Biscay between Spain and northern France directly or not at all. Like all oceans, the North Atlantic has many faces, smiling rainbows and light winds before twisting into a frothy gray rage. In the end, luck was on our side. When I saw the coast of England in the distance, more than a thousand miles of Iberian orca territory now in our wake, I finally relaxed.

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The author and her family anchored off the coast of Kalymnos Island, Greece. They sailed from the Mediterranean to the Arctic and are currently en route to Greenland. (Photo: Patrick Farrell)

So why are orcas ramming boats? There’s no simple answer. Like many complex animal behaviors, the origin of the latest fad has largely been left to speculation. The question has been debated a lot, as have proposed solutions, and it has gotten messy and controversial.

Many of the media reports have framed the Iberian orca situation as polemical, with wealthy yachties pitted against pissed-off whales, conservationists against recreationists, one expert against another. Commenters on Facebook groups and other online conversations tend to be strident voices advocating for whales to be punished for their bad behavior, by way of explosives or government interventions, or, conversely, animal-rights activists proposing romantic but wildly impractical solutions. Others highlight the obvious Malthusian undertones of the orcas’ behavior, a form of retribution exacted on the humans who’ve made such a mess of the ocean.

In my experience, sailors aren’t wont to blow up whales, any more than they’re inclined to trade out sails for motors. Having the rare opportunity to encounter whales and other marine wildlife on their own terms is one of the main draws of sailing.

At face value, it’s easy to take the orcas’ behavior as a giant middle finger to humans and our environmental malfeasance, especially during a time when the planet faces its greatest crisis yet. But these interpretations require a certain amount of arrogance, a human-centered worldview that presumes whales have nothing better to do than wreak revenge on us. They also echo the old and tired trope of man versus nature.

There is no evidence to suggest wild orcas are aggressive toward humans—the few orca-caused human deaths have happened among whales held in captivity, often under inhumane and highly stressful circumstances. By assigning our own emotion and intent to a whale, we do it a disservice, in part by emboldening bad behavior from humans who claim they are responding “in kind.”

An orca comes for a friendly visit in the author’s home waters of Chatham Strait, Alaska. (Video: Caroline Van Hemert)

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According to marine biologists, the most likely explanation is that the attacks on sailboats constitute a form of play. The rudders may be a popularly trending orca toy, with curious juveniles “rewarded” by the satisfaction of breaking rudders, akin to kids smashing ice at recess. Orcas are known to display playful behavior. Elsewhere in the world, the whales have amused onlookers by balancing dead salmon on their heads like hats, rubbing their bellies on pebble beaches, and deliberately moving crab pots from one location to another.

Another hypothesis suggests that the rudders offer useful teaching tools for mimicking behaviors necessary for the whales’ existence, like socialization or hunting practices.

It’s quite possible we’ll never know why orcas are targeting sailboats. As a biologist, I’ve learned not to make any assumptions. The complexity of animal intelligence may exceed our own ability to perceive or describe it; often, the more we learn, the more we realize we don’t know.

Unfortunately, head-butting boats hasn’t earned the Iberian orcas any popularity prizes, and they need all the help they can get. In 2017, this subpopulation was declared “critically endangered” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature due to the small number of individuals and low adult-female survival rates, meaning the population is likely to continue to shrink unless conditions change.

These whales must contend with many of the same challenges other marine mammals face worldwide: noise pollution, climate change, environmental contaminants, changes in fish stocks, and boat collisions, the latter of which are typically caused by ships hitting whales rather than the converse. But this new form of conflict instigated by the whales bodes poorly for orcas and sailors alike.

It’s unclear where this problem, or the orcas themselves, might be headed next. It’s possible the rudder banging will fizzle, like other orca fads, the whales eventually losing interest the way they did with the fish-for-hats trend. It’s also possible the behavior will intensify or expand in scope.

In 2023, the latitudinal distance of sailboat encounters with orcas expanded substantially. In June 2023, a similar incident with an orca was reported a thousand miles north in the North Sea, where a single-handed Dutch sailor was repeatedly rammed during his passage from the Shetland Islands to Norway. Occurring far outside the range of Iberian orcas, this attack raised the possibility that such behaviors had spread to other pods.

What to do about the problem is another question entirely. The prospect of bringing all stakeholders together is complicated. Many of the major players—government agencies, conservation groups, sailing organizations, whale-watching tour guides, and commercial fishers—have diverse and conflicting interests. Trust is often in short supply. Coordinating working groups and sharing data across political borders requires patience and a high tolerance for bureaucratic gymnastics.

As others begin to step forward, and the international community takes interest, I’ll continue to tip my hat to Alves, who recognizes a critical truth: for sailors and whales alike, the ocean is home. Orcas.pt is collaborating with the Portuguese navy and other groups to develop new maps and expand its reach. And they aren’t alone in their efforts.

Last summer, in response to the widely circulating rumors about vengeful or aggressive orcas, from 30 scientists attempted to counter misinformation, emphasizing that assigning human emotion to whale behavior is inaccurate and potentially dangerous. The International Whaling Commission held a workshop on the topic in February, and it recently issued a public report emphasizing the need for additional research and collaboration. On a smaller scale, a graduate project led by Sophie Martel and advisor Dr. Niels Einarsson from the Stefansson Arctic Institute in Akureyri, Iceland, is studying the attitudes of sailors toward orcas to help identify information needs and partnership opportunities.

“We have competent researchers, scientists, and the government that will do some work to reduce this kind of incident,” Alves told me, “…[but] only together can people find a solution, share knowledge, and be informed about it.”

The sailors I corresponded with who’d had orca encounters expressed no ill will toward the whales. Among the lucky ones, like Tromp and the Alders, the experience might have been frightening but ended with minimal damage and no harm to crew. Other orcas.pt members sustained broken rudders and steering components, but most set out again after repairs were complete.

For those sailors who sustained major damage or lost their boats, it would be fair to expect a more antagonistic response. But what I found among the sailing community at large, including those who’d suffered, was not extremism but a measured respect for the ocean and the wildlife it supports. Even the owners of the Grazie Mamma, the boat that sank on Halloween night, had this public statement to offer on their Facebook page: “Love for the sea always wins.”

Caroline Van Hemert and her sons Dawson and Huxley watch dolphins ride the bow wake of Turnstone off the west coast of Portugal. (Video: Patrick Farrell)

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On our final passage of 2023 in mid-December, blowing across the Irish Sea toward Scotland, where we would spend the winter, dolphins arrived to escort us. I swapped out at the helm with Pat just before dawn, taking the last night watch for the year as we approached the winter solstice. Ahead, the sky was clear, phosphorescence glittered, and a pod of cetaceans glowed brightly off our bow. Behind us were several thousand hard-won miles, and a now distant Orca Alley.

I nodded to the dolphins, thanked Turnstone for keeping us safe, and offered a splash of my coffee to Neptune.

Love for the sea always wins.

The author at home on Turnstone in the Irish Sea. (Photo: Patrick Farrell)

Caroline Van Hemert and her family spent the spring sailing, skiing, and climbing in Norway from their boat. They are currently in Iceland. Next stop: Greenland, with tentative plans (per the sailor’s motto: written in sand at low tide) to return home to Alaska sometime in 2025.

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Lead Photo: Stuart Westmorland/Getty