Portugal’s navy, a fishing trawler and onshore port officials succeeded over the weekend in rescuing five people from a lifeboat where they had taken refuge when a pod of orcas sank their sailboat 11 km off the coast.
The attack came in an area where increasing activity by the killer whales has been reported over the past year, including a number of incidents where they have been reported as harassing or playing with boats.
At that time, Portugal issued advice that amounted to ‘play dead and hope they get bored, or more formally, “to all mariners that, in the event of sighting of these mammals, the engine be turned off, in order to inhibit the rotation of the propeller, and immobilize the steering wheel, thus discouraging these mammals to interact with the mobile structures of the vessels.”
