Day 4 : Azores to Ireland

Saturday, May 21st 2022

I’m brushing my teeth, holding on to the sink to counter balance the incessant rolling, and staring out the bathroom window at the glassy calm sea.

Every few seconds the view changes, as we roll to port and my window is now looking straight into the crystal clear water – it’s still 30 cm clear of the water with the particular amplitude of roll, but every now and then a slightly bigger roll dunks the window, and all I can see is icy blue.

When we roll back again, I can see the horizon in the distance, and in the foreground, our wake is making pretty patterns with foam, and I’m semi hypnotised by the ever changing whirls and shapes.

I’m brushing away, lost in a reverie wondering if there’s a mathematical formula which would help predict this effect, when I notice a patch of foam and disturbed water about 5 metres away, too far for our wake to have reached.

Are there dolphins perhaps?

Just then, we roll further and the window is dunked. But instead of icy blue, I see white – a long white belly of something, not 1 metre away from the window under the water! It’s too big to be a dolphin, surely?

As quickly as I see it, we roll back the other way and it’s gone. And when we roll back again, there’s no sign of it.

Did I imagine it?

I spit out my mouthful of toothpaste, and call through the other window in the bathroom which faces into the cockpit, for Jen to check it out.

“I think there’s something on our port side”, I say. “A dolphin, or maybe even a whale!”

I know it couldn’t be a dolphin – it was just too big. But I shudder to think about the alternative.

By the time I make it up to the cockpit, Jen is zipping the enclosure back up – she’d ducked her head out to have a look, but seen nothing. And it’s cold out there!

I’m really disconcerted though, so I open it back up and scan the calm waters near and far, but can see nothing. I go and check the other side, and still nothing.

Jen is convinced I was imagining it, or that it was just a brief sighting of a dolphin and now it’s on its way. But I’m not so sure. My gut is telling me that what I saw was real. And not good.

“Are you alright?”, Jen asks, disconcerted herself by my slightly strange behaviour. I’m standing in the companion way, peering in all directions, a little wildly, truth be told.

I’m not normally freaked out by dolphins, but there is a good reason for me to be on higher alert than normal.

For the last 2 years, a mysterious phenomenon has been occurring off the coast of Portugal, near Gibraltar. A pod of killer whales has been attacking yachts. That’s right – attacking them. Every week or two, another report is made by cruisers of having had their boat barged by the whales – most commonly they attack the rudder, and there have been countless examples of boats limping into ports on the Portuguese coast with broken steering or rudders, and even a couple of sinkings.

No-one knows why it suddenly started happening, and there’s precious little you can do to stop it once an attack happens. Yachts are taking an increasingly wide berth around the area, and the authorities have set up “no sail” corridors, but even those taking a wider berth have reported being attacked.

We’re as close to that area as we’re likely to come – about 450 miles away. Which in fairness is MUCH further than any of the reported issues. But who knows how far these creatures roam. And our greater distance is cold comfort. If we WERE attacked, and lost our rudder, we’d then have much further to limp to shore, probably too far truth be told.

Just when I’m beginning to doubt what I saw myself, and wondering if I was hallucinating through lack of sleep, a whale appears 3 metres away on our starboard side, right behind Jen’s head!

“Jesus H Christ!”, I shout. “There – right there”, I say, pointing. Jen turns around, but it’s gone already.

“I swear, it was right beside us” I exclaim.

“I believe you”, Jen says. She hadn’t seen it herself, but she had seen the disturbance in the water when she turned around.

We keep staring, and 20 seconds later, it surfaces again. On our port side now – it had clearly swum right under us. Jen sees it too, this time.

By this time, I’m behind the wheel, autopilot disengaged, and trying to decide what to do. Do I slow down, to minimise any damage if we hit it, or if it hits us? Or do I speed up, to try and get away?

For the time being, I do nothing, and for the next few minutes, it continually disappears, and reappears. Sometimes on the same side of us, sometimes on the other. Usually it’s just its back and dorsal fin breaking the water. But occasionally, it swims on its side, its giant white belly visible just under the water.

The first thing we note is that it is NOT a killer whale. It doesn’t have the distinctive tall dorsal fin that they have. In fact, it’s dorsal fin is MUCH more like a dolphin - small, dare I say cute, with that distinctive curve/hook that dolphins have.

But this ain’t no dolphin. It’s hard to gauge its size accurately, but it’s at least 5 metres and maybe 6 or 7.

After a couple of very close passes, I notice that I can tell when it goes under us, as our depth gauge suddenly starts reading. We’re in 4,000 metres of water, and the gauge only reads to 100m, so above that, it just shows a row of dashes. But now, when the whale disappears, sometimes the depth sounder springs into life, showing 2.5 m, 1.7m, 1.2m.

This is way too close. I decide to slow down, to minimise any damage, and knock the engine out of gear.

But as our speed drops, we start to speculate about the creature’s intentions.

It’s by itself so far as we can tell. It doesn’t seem to want to attack us, but it’s definitely curious. Perhaps it’s lonely, and is looking for a mate. And perhaps it’s wondering if we might be up for a bit of mammalian cross species hanky-panky. We freak ourselves out deciding that it might interpret us slowing down as some kind of invitation to explore further, and put the throttle down again.

Throughout all of this, it doesn’t seem to care what we do. Slow down, speed up, turn to port or starboard, it continually follows alongside, or underneath us, clearly captivated by our presence.

Slowly, our heart rates return to normal and while we wish it would go away (it’s still swimming FAR too close for comfort, no matter how benign its intentions may be), we do at least start to relax into it a little, and Jen gets some good video footage.

And then, 45 minutes after he first appeared, suddenly he was gone. No final flourish, or wave of the tale. Just went under the surface and didn’t reappear.

A mystery sea creature from the deep. And, despite our usual excitement at seeing any sea life around us, a most unwelcome visitor on this occasion.

In further discussions, we have come to believe it may be the same creature we saw in a large pack in the Mozambique channel. Then, like now, we couldn’t work out if they were dolphins or whales. Much too large to be dolphins but with a similar look to them. When we saw them last year, they were in the distance, and in quite large numbers. And when we stopped at Fogo island off the Mozambique coast, our friend Austin, on S/V Enchantress, told us about them. He’d had a very close encounter, and managed to capture some amazing footage on his go pro under the water.

I can’t remember now what he called them, or much about them, and of course have no internet to look them up, so perhaps if you’re reading this you can google it for us and email us on steelsapphire@myiridium.net to tell us what you find out (but remember, no pictures or attachments as the satellite email can’t cope).

I seem to remember them being called something like “Dolphin whales” (funnily enough), and if memory serves, they had some rather unusual sexual behaviour. And they eat each other! Is that right, or am I misremembering? Not sure, but would love for someone to let us know.

[Edit: Once we got to shore and had the benefit of Google we were able to confirm what many of those responding to this post had speculated - it was a Minke Whale. And (thank goodness) a relatively small one!]

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Day 4 Statistics:

Time on passage so far: 3 days, 20 hours
Distance covered in last 24 hours: 139 nm
Average Speed in last 24 hours: 5.8 knots

Distance to go: 621 nm

Amount of time I spent searching through my old WhatsApp messages to see if I shared any of the content that Austin showed me at Fogo: About 1.5 hours, but still couldn’t find anything, although I’m SURE I did send something.