New approach to reduce the chance of whale strikes in yachts

How likely – really – is your yacht to collide with a whale? We report on a new approach to reduce the chance of whale strikes, plus what sailors can do

“When a 45-tonnes Sperm Whale is on starboard tack, it has right of way. It also has right of way when it’s on port tack!” the legendary French ocean sailor Olivier de Kersauson once said.

Few would argue with him, and no yacht is a match for a whale. Thanks to the vulnerability of rudders, keels, rudder posts or even foils, the spectre of crashing into a large, solid sea creature in deep water has haunted seafarers long before Moby Dick was written in 1851.

For years, reported incidents of cruising yachts colliding with whales were so rare that the risk was supposed to be vanishingly unlikely. The only sailors that did seem to regularly report collisions were ocean racers. Many of those accounts were unclear if they’d hit a whale, a sunfish, a submerged container, or if the carbon boats had simply suffered structural failure.

Some close encounters were recorded. In 2012, during the Miami to Lisbon leg of the Volvo Ocean Race, Chuny Bermudez was helming the VO70 Camper when he spotted a whale just off the port bow, slaloming at 20 knots to avoid it. “It would have been a bad day for both the whale and for us,” observed Camper’s media crew Hamish Hooper. “With reflexes like a cat [Bermudez] narrowly missed what would have been the equivalent of a runaway freight train colliding with a truck.”

Other skippers – and whales – were not so lucky. During a 2016 New York to Les Sables d’Olonne Transat race, the fleet had to route around a Whale Exclusion Zone and TSS off Nantucket. Nevertheless solo skippers in the race reported over a dozen collisions in the first 24 hours between their IMOCAs and unidentified objects, now assumed to be marine mammals.

In 2017 Vendée Globe skipper Kito de Pavant was racing in the Indian Ocean when he captured a violent collision with a sperm whale on video, the whale shown surfacing in the wake of his IMOCA Bastide Otio after the crash. The impact destroyed areas of the hull and part of the keel, causing de Pavant to abandon ship to a research vessel. It left no doubt of the devastating potential of a whale strike mid-ocean.

Changing views

Things have changed in the decade since. Foiling advances means IMOCAs and Ultims are sailing faster than ever before, but also with more vulnerable hull protrusions. Avoiding underwater collisions became a hot topic among racing teams keen to improve reliability.

Then in 2020 orcas began seemingly attacking yachts around Gibraltar, for no knowable reason. Suddenly there were numerous Orca whale strike incidents reported, and dozens of cruising yachts pulling into Spain with rudder damage. Scientific and media attention turned to the conundrum, trying to identify causes of the behaviour, or methods to drive the orcas away.

And there has also been a more fundamental shift in how we see marine life. Cannoning into majestic, possibly endangered, whales is not just expensive and dangerous, it’s becoming unacceptable.

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Damian Foxall has been at the forefront of this rethinking process. Foxall is an ocean racer with 10 round the world races and numerous records to his name, and is co-founder of the Marine Mammal Advisory Group (MMAG). “It’s a perspective [change] for the sailing community to move from ‘We can sail wherever we want to’, to being ocean stewards rather than ocean users,” he explains.

After that 2016 transat, Foxall realised the problem was being wildly underreported.

“Through my own experiences, I think I’ve had about 10 or so collisions or strikes of various types, certainly some with big marine mammals.

“I reached out to the International Whaling Commission and asked for their current marine strike log related to the sailing sector, and I received reports of 60 strikes, which went way back to the 1800s. I realised, well, I’ve got 10. So it’s not that we’re not even underreporting. We’re not actually reporting at all.”

How many whale strikes?

Foxall and the MMAG is currently working to compile a comprehensive log of collisions, near misses and sightings by sailors of whales and marine mammals. The last time such a survey was conducted was by German marine biologist Dr Fabian Ritter in 2012. Ritter identified 111 collisions and 57 near misses.

Worryingly, seven sailing vessels sank after those collisions. That data has been incorporated into the MMAG database, along with any historic incidents or individual accounts Foxall and his team can trace through contacts.

MMAG is also calling on all sailors – racing or cruising – to share their experiences through a global survey.

“The log starts all the way back with The Essex in 1819, right up to the present day. We’ve moved from 60 reports to closer to 1,000, which are not just cetaceans or marine life, but includes other objects. Though typically, if you hit a log, you might forget it, but if you hit a whale, you don’t.”

Besides the strike log, observations by marine biologists and known migration routes can be used to calculate areas of risk, and where necessary to route yachts away. This has been a step-change for ocean racing.

Ahead of last year’s IMOCA transats – the last big qualifiers before the Vendée Globe – data from flights over the waters off New York by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was analysed. “Just one flyover identified 30 big animals on the surface within 4-6 hours. That was information that we were able to feed back to the race organisers, and then ask the question, ‘Are you happy to have your fleet racing through that area when we know it’s an area of high biodiversity, high risk?’,” explains Foxall.

The decision was made to finish the incoming transat and start the eastbound NY-Vendée race more than 100 miles offshore, rather than have the fleets sail past the iconic Statue of Liberty – a huge reduction in potential commercial value, as Foxall points out. “But whether you come from what is now my perspective as friends of the marine mammals, or if you’re coming from the perspective of, ‘I just don’t want to break my bloody boat before the Vendée Globe,’ they both want the same thing.”

This could potentially also make waters safer for cruising sailors. Areas around the Azores and Cape Verdes were designated marine biodiversity exclusion zones during the last Vendée Globe and Ocean Race – similar to the moving ice exclusion zones that round the world race organisers deploy.

But they are also popular routes for Atlantic cruisers. Foxall says this is one of the next areas of work: “Can we – or do we need to – do a global risk assessment as it relates to typical sailing routes, cruising rallies and migrations of yachts, and identify those areas that are most at risk? To suggest areas to be more careful in or even avoid where it’s justified.”

See, trace, and avoid

Latest tech has a big role to play in recording and sharing the location of strikes or near-misses – and avoiding them. A ‘Hazard Button’ reporting system has been created for Adrena and Expedition navigation systems – similar to an MOB button. Originally developed in the IMOCA fleet, it alerts other skippers nearby, as well as race organisers (who can pass the info to boats using other navigation software), and geo-tags the incident.

Foxall says another major project is going on in the US to develop an NMEA protocol to improve reporting, “So whether you’re using Garmin, the Hazard Button system, WhaleAlert, Raymarine, Navico… we’re all exchanging the same bit of information and meaning the same thing.”

Things are moving quickly: MMAG is working to integrate their log into the well-established WhaleAlert app, and Foxall says a new version of the WhaleAlert app will be coming out this March with more detailed European data. In February PredictWind also added a new Whale Watch feature to its DataHub, using information from WhaleAlert to share sightings reported in the previous three days within a 100-mile radius of yachts using PredictWind forecasting.

Most IMOCAs now carry the masthead SEA.AI camera system (formerly OSCAR), which is designed to see and detect potential hazards. The technology has its limitations – not least visibility on high speed yachts – but is self-learning and improving rapidly.

“Underwater, there’s also some quite good technology which can probably be scaled down to sailing vessels, including forward-facing sonar. When you say sonar and marine mammals everyone puts up red flags, but that specific technology has been designed at a frequency and intensity which has minimal impact on sealife and still delivers useful information,” explains Foxall.

The one area of technology which is not widely being developed is that of ‘pingers’. Once heralded as a potential solution and trialled on some racing yachts, pingers are now outlawed in most areas due to the disturbance they cause marine mammals.

Foxall believes they are ineffective and a technological dead-end. “There’s the fact that species are frequency-specific. And even if they can hear a pinger, does it actually elicit the right reaction? Certain animals, you bang a gong and they come for dinner! Or they get nervous and they come to the surface. Maybe some of them can learn that gong means ‘Boat! Stay away’. But it’s really a lot of pseudoscience, and in fact, some very clear science proves that it doesn’t work.”

Avoiding orcas

Unlike most incidents in the strike log, the well-publicised occurrences of orcas biting or hitting sailing yachts off Spain and Portugal are not random collisions. Instead they are the result of orcas seeking and – although marine conservationists are careful not to describe them as ‘attacks’ – deliberately making contact with rudders and keels, sometimes violently.

But the same principles – applying data to keep yachts away from orcas rather than the reverse – can mitigate the risk. The Grupo Trabajo Orca Atlantica (GTOA) and Cruising Association (CA) have been asking sailors transiting the area to report strikes, or safe passages without strikes. Over five seasons their combined results give a fairly comprehensive picture of the frequency of orca incidents, their time of year and location.

Of over 675 interactions reported, 62% resulted in no damage, 33% in moderate damage and 15% in severe damage. In the last three years, two boats have sunk each year. No sailor has been hurt in any of the incidents, beyond some bruising.

According to John Burbeck, the Cruising Association’s Orca Project lead, the submitted reports have enabled analysts to rule out many variables when trying to work out which boats are most susceptible. Monohull or multihull, yachts motoring or sailing, weather and sea state, time of day, even the colour of antifoul have all been examined with no meaningful conclusions drawn.

The only two consistent factors are that orcas mostly make contact with vessels with rudders, particularly spade rudders (ie sailing yachts not powerboats, though some small fishing vessels are reported to have been hit). And, Burbank says, there have been no reported interactions in water less than 20m deep.

The orcas’ typical seasonal migration pattern is also well documented. Typically the pods follow Bluefin tuna as they spawn from the Mediterranean in summer out of the Gibraltar Straits, up the Portuguese Atlantic coast, and into the Bay of Biscay. There are some exceptions: in 2023 the tuna were later than usual to leave the Med, which meant the orcas were hunting unusually far east, with reports of boats damaged as far as Malaga. It was also a year that saw higher numbers of incidents with yachts.

Skippers planning ahead can view CA data which lists the total number of encounters over eight areas from Marbella to Biscay, month by month since 2020, and identify whether the time of year and route they are intending to transit is statistically likely to be high or low risk. For short-term planning the GTOA has a traffic light warning system based on live and recent reports to illustrate the immediate perceived risk level.

Other precautions

If planning to stick to the 20m contour line to reduce the risk of encountering orcas, there is a lot of fishing gear, pots etc in the area. It’s advised to transit the busiest areas in daylight to reduce the risk of entanglement, and consider buddying with another boat in case of any issues. It also goes without saying, to allow enough time to avoid inclement conditions – tragically four sailors died when their yacht was rolled and beached while sailing close inshore in severe weather near Peniche, Portugal, in 2023 (it’s not known if they were attempting to avoid orca).

If your yacht is approached by orca, Burbank advises there are only two legal deterrents: throwing sand into the water (it’s believed this can confuse the orcas which use echo location to find rudders), and making loud noises – playing the yacht’s stereo full blast, blaring foghorns, hitting a metal pipe and so on. Deploying any type of firecracker or flare is not allowed, or anything that could hurt an orca as they are a protected species.

While most ‘pingers’ are forbidden, a new ‘acoustic startle device’ is being developed in conjunction with GenusWave which is designed to mirror the orca’s own communication and uses a reportedly species-specific frequency. The device was originally due to be trialled in September 2024 off Cascais, but the orca pod wasn’t spotted in the area. Trials are scheduled again this summer.

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