Orcas Sink Sailing Yacht With Family of Five Off Portugal

Last week, a family of five survived a sinking off the coast of Portugal, which was initiated by the latest aggressive encounter between the local orcas and a yacht rudder.

On Friday, the Portuguese military received a distress call from the French sailing yacht Ti'fare, which was operating about 50 nautical miles off the coast of Peniche. The crew consisted of three young children and their parents, and they reported that they had been rammed by orcas and were taking on water.

The family launched their life raft and boarded successfully. Within a short time, they were picked up by the good Samaritan fishing boat Silmar and brought safely on deck. To bring them to shore, the Portuguese Air Force dispatched a Merlin helicopter out of Montijo, returning them to dry land at about 2300 hours the same evening. Additional assets were dispatched to the scene but were not needed.

It is the second yacht in a month that has been sunk by Iberian orcas. In broad daylight and close to shore, the pod struck the rudder of a sailing vessel off Fonte de Telha, causing it to spin and then sink. The crew abandoned ship and were rescued without injury. Another yacht nearby had to be evacuated the same day after the same group of orcas went after it.

The attacks have been a problem for years. A number of known and identified orcas around the Iberian Peninsula have developed the unwelcome habit of smashing into yacht rudders, an activity that may be entertainment for the orcas but is dangerous for mariners. The attacks are limited to slow-moving sailing yachts with comparatively large rudders, and it has been suggested that they are a form of play - the objective being to make the yacht spin around.

The crewmembers themselves are not believed to be the target. In all of human history, there are no recorded cases of a fatal orca attack on a person in the wild - though there are records of joint human-orca hunting partnerships.

Lamya Essemlali, an orca researcher, believes that the yacht sinkings aren't the objective of the unwanted behavior. Hundreds of harassed yachts have survived the interaction with varying degrees of damage, and she suggests that the orcas have the capability to sink a sailing yacht with consistency if that is what they set out to do. "They wouldn't have sunk four or five like they have, they would have sunk the 600," she said.