WHALE STRIKES

HOW LIKELY – REALLY – ARE YOU 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.