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'They were having a real go': Scottish man recounts Orca attack

A little after dawn on Tuesday morning, Graeme Walker felt a shudder move through his 15-metre (48ft) yacht as it passed off Cape Finisterre. Then the wheel locked.

His first thought was that something had gone wrong with the autohelm. But when the wheel started shifting hard to left and right, the retired chief financial officer remembered an article he’d read recently and quickly realised his boat, the Promise 3, was not to blame.

The culprits were overzealous orcas, also known as killer whales, whose rough encounters with boats off the north-west coast of Spain have prompted the maritime authorities to order smaller vessels to give the area a wide berth. But the instruction came a little late for Walker, his wife, Moira, and their friend Stephen Robinson.

“While the wheel was being ripped out of my hands, one of the orcas broke surface to get air,” he told the Guardian.

“We were conscious of the fact that there were two whales and then a third one joined, and it was huge. The head of the third one was massive. They were having a real go at the rudder. You couldn’t hold the wheel; you’d have broken your arm because the wheel was spinning from one lock to the other.”

While the whales passed underneath the yacht, which was spinning to port and then to starboard, Walker called the Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centre (MRCC) in Finisterre.

They told him to stop the boat and sit tight, adding that the orcas would probably lose interest after 10 minutes or so.

The estimate proved optimistic and the trio, who were sailing home to the Clyde in Scotland from Almería in south-west Spain, ended up sitting tight for 45 minutes, their lifejackets on and their grab-bags at the ready.

“The MRCC called us back after 15 minutes and said, ‘Are things OK?’. We said, ‘It’s still going on’, which they said was really unusual.”

Eventually, the orcas swam off, but those aboard the Promise 3 decided to give it half an hour before getting on their way again. Despite the encounter, the yacht’s steering was still working and Walker set sail “gingerly, in light winds”.

They sailed at between one and three knots for an hour before turning on the engine and heading for the port of La Coruña, which they eventually reached 10 hours later.

The incident was one of a series of encounters between orcas and boats that has baffled marine biologists and led Spain’s transport ministry to order some vessels out of the area over the next week.

On the same day in late August, a Spanish naval yacht surrendered part of its rudder to a pair of orcas, while a French boat was left with marks on its hull. Two weeks later, an 11-metre yacht on its way to the UK lost steering and had to be towed into port following another orca-related incident.

“The interactions with the orcas have, for the most part, affected medium-sized boats of 15 metres or less,” the transport ministry said on Tuesday as it banned boats of that size from sailing close to the coast between Cape Prioriño Grande and Estaca de Bares point in Galicia.

“All the encounters have taken place between two and eight nautical miles from the coast and while the boats were travelling at between five and nine knots.”

The statement said boats affected by the order could sail perpendicular to the no-go area to reach port or head out into open water. The decision, it added, had been taken “to guarantee the safety of people and the orcas themselves”.

Orcas are usually spotted off Galicia each September as they make their way up from the Gulf of Cádiz and follow tuna into the Bay of Biscay, but experts say the incidents seen over the past few weeks are very rare.

Bruno Díaz, a biologist at the local Bottlenose Dolphin Research Institute, said orcas were attracted to small yachts because of their size, and that the animals in question – probably “immature teenage” orcas – had probably just got a bit carried away.

“We’re not their natural prey,” he told the Associated Press. “They’re having fun – and maybe these orcas have fun causing damage.”

Walker is waiting for the Promise 3 to be lifted out of the water so that he can get a proper idea of the damage done by the fun-loving orcas. But he can already see that there’s “a big chunk missing out of the bottom of the rudder”.

Meanwhile, the Walkers and Robinson are getting over the shock of the encounter – “we had a few drinks” – and are keen to get home.

“The boat weighs about 12 tonnes but these animals were chucking the thing around like it was just something else,” said Graeme Walker. “It wasn’t pleasant.”