Two British men have shared their horror after being woken up surrounded by a pod of orcas attacking the boat they were sailing in.
Mark Garrood, 59, was sailing on the Butey of the Clyde near Gibraltar with friends when he was woken up by "two big thumps".
The group discovered four killer whales repeatedly ramming the 21 tonne yacht and ripping off the two rudders before the Spanish coastguard came to the rescue, reports the Sunday Times.
Captain Iain Hamilton, 60, said “we felt we were being shaken about like a rag doll”.
He added: “At one point the four of them lined up and came very slowly in a line towards the boat. I thought, ‘They’re going to try and push us over’. The coordination was unbelievable.”
The attack is the latest episode involving orcas in the Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula.
On Wednesday, a pod of killer whales repeatedly rammed the Mustique, a yacht in the Strait of Gibraltar, damaging it enough to require Spanish rescuers to come to the aid of its four crew members.
Spain's Maritime Rescue service said that killer whales repeatedly ran into the 20-metre vessel sailing under a UK flag, late on Wednesday, breaking its rudder and cracking its hull.
Spanish rescuers needed to pump out seawater before towing her to safety.
The alert reached the Spanish service via their British counterparts, who had relayed on the distress call, the Spanish service said.
A helicopter and a rescue boat were deployed to help the damaged boat to dock in Barbate.
This was the 24th such incident registered by the service this year.
But the Atlantic Orca Working Group, a team of Spanish and Portuguese marine life researchers who study killer whales near the Iberia Peninsula, says that these incidents are not new with similar episodes first reported three years ago.
In 2020, the group registered 52 such events, some of which resulted in damaged rudders. That increased to 197 in 2021 and to 207 in 2022.
The killer whales seem to be targeting boats in a wide arc covering the western coast of the Iberia Peninsula, from the waters near the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain's northwestern Galicia.
According to the group, these killer whales are a small group of about 35 whales that spend most of the year near the Iberian coast in pursuit of red tuna.
The so-called Iberian orcas average from five to six and a half metres in length.
There have been no reports of attacks against swimmers. The interactions on boats seem to stop once the vessel becomes immobilised.
Biologist Alfredo Lopez, of the University of Aveiro and member of the research group, said that the incidents are rare - and enticingly odd.
"In none of the cases that we have been able to see on video have we witnessed any behavior that could be considered aggressive," Mr Lopez told The Associated Press. "They appear calm, nothing at all like when they are on the hunt."
Mr Lopez said that while the cause of the behavioral turn is unknown, his group has identified 15 individual whales that are involved in the incidents.
He said that 13 are young whales, which could support the theory that they are playing, while two are adults, which could support a competing theory that the behaviour is the result of some traumatic event with a boat.
In either case, he said the whales are showing once again that they are social animals.
"Orcas are animals with their own culture," he said. "They transmit information to one another."
