August 11, 2022 was an unusually calm day in the Bay of the Biscay. Onboard the sailing vessel Triola the Erichsen family didn’t fear the weather the bay had gained its ill reputation from. In the early morning the wind had died and Triola motored slowly, heading to A Coruña in northern Spain. There was barely a ripple on the water. But below the surface, orcas were advancing. One animal was moving towards the boat from the stern. Mikkel Erichsen, the skipper of Triola, didn’t see it. Another approached from the bow and when it surfaced, Erichsen glimpsed a dark triangular fin. The orcas moved in.

Since 2020, orcas around Portugal and Spain have wrecked more than 100 boats, sometimes ramming them full force with all the weight of their 6-to-8-ton bodies, other times hitting the rudder or biting it to pieces with their 3-inch-long teeth. In 2020, scientists counted 52 so- called ‘interactions’ between boats and orcas. In 2021 this number climbed to 197 and in 2022 to 207. Many boats were so badly damaged they needed to be towed to land for repairs. Scientists use the word interaction to signify that they don’t know the motives behind the unusual behaviour. Sailors, on the other hand, call the interactions ‘attacks’. In marinas in Gibraltar and Portugal and along the Galician coast in northwestern Spain all that is talked about is orcas.

My own experiences with orcas do not include the kind of interactions that boaters have endured in Spain and Portugal. As a marine biologist I have studied orcas in Norway for almost a decade, and I have spent countless hours observing them from boats. My fascination was spurred by the many examples of their playful and curious nature. When I read about the interactions in Spain and Portugal, I was instantly intrigued.

Over a video call, Erichsen tells me the story of the day it became his family’s turn to grapple with the feared whales. As a seasoned sailor he had set out with his wife and three children from Norway three months earlier on a year-long journey. He told me that to lessen the risk of an interaction, they had decided on a westerly course across the Bay of Biscay from Brest in France to A Coruña in Spain keeping the boat in waters over 4,000 metres deep. Most interactions with the orcas have taken place in shallower water, so staying in deep water for as long as possible seemed like a good strategy.

The strategy had worked well until August 11, when he saw the fin of an orca cutting through the water. “Seconds after I saw the fin there was a loud crash,” Erichsen explains, “the boat shuddered as if we had hit a rock.” He realised that another orca was under the boat whacking the rudder or the hull full force. Then he spotted a third whale. Underwater the three orcas took turns mauling the rudder. Each time the whales hit it, the steering wheel spun abruptly from side to side. The whales surfaced close to the boat, their exhalations sharp and powerful, sounding like explosions, before they submerged again. When Erichsen tried to manoeuvre the boat, he could tell that the steering was broken. “I had to call the coast guard and ask to be towed,” he says. The Triola’s rudder is equipped with two ‘stoppers’ on each side to prevent it from turning all the way around and hitting the hull. “I was concerned about the bashing and went below deck to check the hull from the inside,” Eriksen remembers.

He could immediately tell that both stoppers were either broken or ripped off. The orcas were turning the rudder all the way around and each time they pressed with all their weight on what remained of the rudder he could see the hull of the boat bulging inwards, swelling like a bad bruise. “That’s when I got really nervous”, he recalls. “It was below the waterline. If they managed to press so hard that they broke a hole, water would be pouring in. And it would come fast.” Shaken, Erichsen untied the life raft, so he could launch it quickly into the water if needed.

The Spanish coast guard arrived before it became necessary to get into the raft and towed Triola and the Erichsens to A Coruña. Even during the procedure to fasten the tow and after the Triola was being pulled behind the coast guard the orcas kept up their assault. In the marina Erichsen inspected the damage. The orcas had bitten large pieces off the rudder.