As we have reported over the last few years, orca whales have been attacking and sinking sailing vessels off the coast of Portugal and Spain. But, now it looks like sperm whales are getting into the action.
Last Saturday, an Australian-flagged sloop, Tai Tam, was struck by sperm whales 250 miles from Norfolk Island in the Tasman Sea. Jemma and Jeremy Cooper plus two crew, were on their way to New Zealand in the midst of a three-month sailing vacation in the western South Pacific.
“There was a tremendous thud,” Jemma Cooper told the BBC. “I saw six whales behind us.”
Jemma was at the helm and the force of the blow to the sloop’s rudder was enough to throw her off her feet. “There were like six of them and two were huge, as long as our boat.”
With the rudder badly damaged the Tai Tam began taking on water and was soon starting to sink. The Coopers launched their life raft and inflatable dinghy, set off their EPIRB and called a Mayday.
“It was pretty clear the situation was likely to be unrecoverable and given our location, 500 nautical miles north of New Zealand, … we called a Mayday,” Jeremy Cooper told the BBC. “They had tasked a merchant shipping vessel to intercept us and pick us up and get us into the life raft.”
The crew took to their life raft and watched as the sloop slowly sank a hundred yards from them. But, they had to wait 17 hours before the small French-flagged container ship was able to rendezvous with them. The ship, steaming from New Zealand to New Caledonia, was able to pull alongside the raft and dinghy so the castaways could climb the hanging ladder to the deck.
The Coopers and their two crew were taken to Noumea, New Caledonia and then flew home to Melbourne, Australia.
One of the crew was able to capture video of the whale strike. It certainly appears that the sperm whales were acting with some kind of intent, much the way the orcas in the Strait of Gibraltar do. Yet, sperm whales, which can grow to 40 feet in length, are not apex predators like orcas and are not known to be aggressive.
