Quote:
Originally Posted by Bart Man
Hi all. I am interested in any data or peoples personal experiences hitting whales...
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In the
Marquesas in 1976, on my 37-foot
SeaRunner Spice, I met a Belgian couple on a 45-foot
steel ketch, and a French couple on a 55-foot
steel ketch. Both had come to the
Marquesas from the
Galapagos; that was when you could still visit them.
They'd both gotten attacked by killer whales about half way through their passages. The attacks were identical, with one whale slamming each side of the vessel a couple of feet underwater with their heads. The steel was 3/16" on the 45-footer, and 1/4" on the 55-footer, and the dents on each side came an easy 8 inches into the
boats.
If they had been
fiberglass or wooden
boats, they would have sunk within seconds, with two 3-foot holes in them.
3 days south of the Big Island around 1986, headed for
Tahiti, a 36-foot
trimaran was attacked by a killer whale and holed under the forward V-berth. They patched the leak somewhat and came back to the Big Island for
repairs; never made it to
Tahiti.
My friends Ginny and Robert ran into a juvenile (only 35 feet) sperm whale with their 32-foot
displacement keel boat on the way from the
Galapagos to the Marquesas in 1976; they were down below,
cooking and eating, when the
boat stopped dead from 5-1/2 knots and everything loose, including them, ended up in the forward V-berth a half second later. No holes, no
leaks, they came out on
deck and saw the whale listlessly moving off on the surface, and a big patch of bloody
water.
A guy I knew in
Hawaii with a 35-foot
Piver Lodestar
trimaran was out whale watching humpbacks with a group of friends, fairly calm
weather, when he motored over to get a closer look at a mother whale and calf on the surface. The mother disappeared for a few seconds, then breached right next to the boat, falling on the port outrigger, snapping off the front ten feet of it. After this was when the Hawaiian authorities made the law requiring boats to keep a 500-foot distance from whales, and if the whales came closer, the boat was not allowed to engage engines or move until the whales were again 500 feet or further away.
Driving my 24-foot
displacement fishing boat in
Hawaii in 1981, doing ten knots at night, thank God
steering with my
head around the corner of the
cabin (not looking through the spray-covered plexiglass windows), I saw the
head of a humpback coming up about 60 feet in front of me, going in the exact same direction I was.
I slammed the shift from full forward to full screaming reverse in about a half second, and the whale's tail had just gone below the surface as I glided over that same spot still doing about 3 knots. If I'd been driving inside the cab, I'd have hit a 20-ton whale on its way up to breathe, while doing 10 knots. As it was, I cracked the shaft coupling in half; it was the grace of God that it held and stopped me.
I've always wondered what was wrong: I thought whales had sonar and could locate stuff. I mean, a 24-hp
diesel at full throttle? I can hear stuff like that when I'm
scuba diving in those waters an easy 200 to 300 feet away, or more. Maybe humpbacks have a "blind spot" directly behind them?
Close calls all, God watch over all mariners and bless them,
With Warm Aloha, Tim