I'm a skipper and I recently spoke with other skippers who do these routes often.

All orca attacks happen of 20mt+ deep waters. It's common knowledge that in the hot orca areas you must be in shallow waters (20mt or less).

As in all orca attacks so far, also this one was on a hot area and on deep waters.

What kind of nautical unit is mt?

I don't see it anywhere on the unit table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units

its meters. Depth calculations are usually in meters. I think that might even be true in US coastal waters?

Meters

Don't use anything else but m.

They're looking for something that has been experienced earlier after an accidental attack once. May be some food, may be cocaine (like the sharks or the bear), may be alcohol which was in de water after such a crash.. the animals are too get hurt by the actions, so it's clearly not for fun. But, it may be compared with collaboration among other species to get food. May be the orcas are looking at the boats as crows on nuts..

Interesting idea

> The fight between man and beast is going to get worse.

Go team Beast!

filed under heartwarming news

Can you buy a yacht for $128k? Maybe a very old one. Not sure about the European boat market.

128k is a pretty expensive one. I've done week long holidays on much cheaper boats.

The cost of boats is more in maintenance and storage, which tends to be 10-20% of the price of the boat per year.

It's a 39 foot sailboat

Yacht can just mean 40 foot boat

Today 2500 Euro is enough.

https://www.marktplaats.nl/l/watersport-en-boten/kajuitzeilb...

I read one theory to why these attacks happen that seems plausible to me. The Mediterranean has a lot of noise from boats that disturb the marine life. Imagine living 24/7 in a construction site. I think they are angry and desperate.

Orca attacks don't happen in the Med. They happen in the Atlantic ocean.

You read the article or headline? "2-hour Mediterranean Sea attack"

Article is wrong. They mainly (like this one) happen in the Strait of Gibraltar on the ocean side. I think it never happened inside the Med so far.

It happened in the Strait of Gibraltar

TFA is about an Orca attack in the Mediterranean

Looks like TFA is wrong. According to other sources, the attack happened near Tarifa and Barbate in Spain, which are on the Atlantic side of the Strait of Gibraltar.

> “It’s only a matter of time before someone shoots one of these killer whales,” Powell ominously warned.

There's no "animal lovers only" screening for boat ownership, and the captains & owners of small boats are often very invested in them (emotionally and/or financially). Reasonable assumption: The shooting started a while ago, it's only scale-up and media coverage that are matters of time.

I remember there was a story of an American sailing yacht which got reported for shooting at the orcas. (Someone heard the shots and used AIS to report the boat to the coastguard) Spanish police entered the boat, found the weapons and last I read they are currently awaiting trial for smuggling weapons and possesion of illegal firearms.

It is rare for boats to have guns, as transporting guns between countries is a very difficult affair.

It’s the same as farmers with wolves, coyotes, lynx, etc: shoot, shovel, shut up —just without the shoveling.

That is, if you get the predator before it gets your object of value, the data point is lost.

We have always been at war with Oceania.

Most of the countries along that coastline (where you would dock, the other side is like Libya) have rather strict laws about the keeping of firearms, which makes shooting somewhat less likely.

Imagine this happening on a longer sail where help might be much further away, that’s kinda scary

I definitely would not be surprised if this ends up in people being prepared for these attacks in the future, if this keeps occurring, and I’m afraid that won’t do good for the orcas.