Our delivery Yacht had a serious interaction with a large pod of Orcas

oh well steering through essentially a rather serious author interaction needs a trembling so what was happening well we were about 50 miles or so from gibraltar just leaving the atlantic ocean and heading towards the mediterranean and the straits of gibraltar maybe about 25 miles or so off the coast of spain you can see the wheel here being ripped from my hand violently on its full lock from left to right or port to starboard however you want to call it but at no point was able to control it so what's happening here is we're still motoring we've got the sails up and obviously the engine electrics and everything around shortly we'll turn the engine off turn off the electrics and hope that that'll be enough to stop their inquisitive nature now these attacks it's attack's a terrible word to use and the word killer whale is something that i'm not particularly fond of as well because it's such a dramatic and negative thing but this wasn't friendly it was not like watching dolphins that come up to the side of the boat and swim along this was something a little bit more orchestrated orchestrated what seemed to be happening was there was a pod and i'm guessing maybe of up to about i thought at some point about maybe 20 of them ranging from the smallest little baby ones up to some full-sized adults they would go under the boat they would bash up against the hull and they would rub their bodies i'm assuming up against the rudder stock i'm not sure if they were using their teeth either but at some point we did notice behind the boat chunks of the rudder that had been bitten off at this point onwards we've got the sails off they're breathing the sounds coming from them was quite eerie so with these little chunks of rudder sitting out in the water i'm like this isn't a good thing because the last thing i ever wanted to do was basically have to deploy a life raft if the boat was sinking and i don't know about you but the idea of being kick flipped to jesus is not the way that i plan to go to heaven in this planet so they would come under the boat and as i say i'm not sure if it was their teeth they were using the only reason i say that i'm not sure is at one point i did look behind the boat and saw one of the orches with a fairly large chunk of rudder in its mouth that didn't fill me with a great deal of optimism some reason i thought you know what i think this boat's got problems they were huge i mean just absolutely massive beasts and beautiful quite recognizable with their markings one or two that you notice had some sort of wounds previous wounds not open wounds that they had recently but something that might have suffered a long long time ago maybe that's why they're so tired of boats but each time you hear that chang sound it's the the wheel or the helm being violently moved from side to side and that has to be doing damage there's nathan a fellow crewmate whipped out of my hand several times and i'm lucky to break my fingers his reaction at one point was should we have a cup of tea and i was like yeah i think let's have a cup of tea it's a good british way to deal with the walker interaction their breath wasn't great either i suppose they're supposed to be looking for tuna at this time of year and to be honest there's not a great deal of fish at all in the med and can you imagine being that size of an animal how much food they need to find apparently it's there's an association with man and the lack of food and they're intelligent enough to be able to realize that we are probably responsible for the lack of food maybe that's why they've been targeting the boats at the end of the day it's their ocean we're the visitors home they're having a word all the time that's an awful joke nathan but then again it wasn't exactly the time for the best of our sense of humor they are beautiful and they are huge and massive just a proper apex predator so we were making our way at this point to gibraltar we found that we were able to still sail bubbles it blew up under the boat we seem to be able to sail there was some issues with the steering it was making a terrible sound and was clanking away whenever it was being used so the idea was let's get the boat to gibraltar let's look and see what's going to be done damage wise and assess it from there so this attack took part for best part of about two hours it was something that at one point they did stop and go away but they did return and that kind of filled me with a bit of dread to be honest there's my white knuckles so we made our way back we should say limped into gibraltar checked in and i took the camera underneath and you can see the big chunk out of the rudder that's been bitten and or chewed off so you can see there it's it's well i think the sailing term is knackered that's pretty serious so anyway that was the damage that was the end of the trip and i'm uh grateful and glad it's over so the trip was a yacht delivery that was taking place initially started off in the netherlands we picked up the boat in ramsgate and we were making our way to lefkada out in greece unfortunately with the damage to the rudder it was the end of the trip and the boat will have to be pulled out of the water hauled out have an insurance assessment and repaired um didn't really get a chance to see what damage was done to the underside on the hull could have been nothing it could have been a bit more serious but at that point the trip was over so i flew back from gibraltar to the uk and i jumped on the plane and i made my way out to greece anyway where i am right now on my own boat akwasu i've been trying to get to a free yeah the whole purpose of the trip was to get to greece didn't work out quite as planned but hey what price for an adventure so i'm hoping that my future videos won't be quite as animal intensive as being involved in an awkward interaction like that but it was a unique experience i'm grateful for it and uh something i'll never forget never ever will i forget that but in the meantime i'm just looking forward to getting my own boat back on the water slightly back to the uk and to be honest i think the chances of me going back via the straits of gibraltar and my boat are slim to none to be honest slim to none because i have a tiller arm and unlike that boat kismet which was a halberg rc49 big boat that this is a 31 footer there's a big difference in size and with the wheel it could only go from left to right spinning on its own axis i've got a tiller arm and if that had come back and forth bones would have been broken people would have been thrown overboard and it's a no from me so i think what i'll be doing in the next few weeks is sailing up along the coast making my way to france and entering the uk channel via the french canals it seems like the most appropriate way to do this so yeah thanks for watching it's been fun and as i say hopefully some of the videos in the future will be a little less animal focused bye you

Channel: Martin Evans

Views: 316,310

Keywords: Orca, Killer whale, Rudder damage, Halcyon yachts, Hallberg Rassey 49, Martin Evans, Hellpants, Nathan Jones, Gibraltar, Spanish Coast, Orca interaction, Boat damage, Orca attack, Killer whale attack, Boat attacked by whales

Id: iEpvQKxz5JU

Length: 9min 12sec (552 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 23 2021