Boat Caught Up In Orca Attack
On Gray Whales

Thursday, May 26, 2005
MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA - Take a three-ton boat. Add a 45-ton whale. And what do you get? "Four minutes of absolute terror," said Florian Graner. And he ought to know.

Earlier this month, it was Graner's small boat that careened wildly as a huge gray whale thrashed beneath it, fighting for her life against a pod of determined killer whales.

It was a little like riding a bucking bronco -- of brontosaurian proportions.

And it was a fearful ending to what had begun as a nearly perfect day.

Graner, a marine biologist and freelance cinematographer, was about to start work on a BBC documentary about gray whales. So he decided to take his boat out for a test drive.

And because conditions were so good -- warm sun, flat seas -- he took along his wife, Gina, their 2-year-old daughter Jasmin, and their neighbor, Darcie Henning.

"I did have the camera with me," Graner said, "because I always do."

As they headed out of Monterey Harbor, they saw plenty of seals and sea otters and then, within a half hour, a pod of killer whales, or orcas.

It was a big day for orcas. Graner's friend Nancy Black, a marine biologist with Monterey Bay Whale Watch, had also found a pod.

"Ours were very calm and relaxed," Graner said.

Black's pod seemed less thrilled about having company and eluded her after awhile. But Graner's boat followed its pod at a safe distance all afternoon.

But about 6:30 p.m., about six miles west of the Monterey Canyon weather buoy, the whales had a sudden mood shift.

"They picked up speed," Graner said, "and started 'porpoising'" -- rhythmically arcing in and out of the water, close to the surface. And they changed direction, heading north toward Santa Cruz.

The boat followed, keeping pace.

Soon the pod of orcas joined forces with more pods of orcas that were already chasing their favorite prey, a baby gray whale with its mother.

The call to the hunt had gone out, Graner believes.

"Obviously they manage to communicate over very long distances," he said. "Nancy's pod was already there."

In all, at least 30 killer whales had congregated -- no males, just adult females and juveniles. Graner thinks this was a training session, with the adults teaching the juveniles how to hunt.

By the time his pod arrived, he said, the grays already seemed exhausted. But the mother hadn't given up.

"She was rolling around her calf," he said, "slicing with her pectoral, making a huge spray, all to get the killers away from her baby."

Still, they came at her from all sides, jumping on her head and her baby's, trying to drown them both. "They're really good at what they do," Graner said, "very coordinated in terms of group activities."

Suddenly the mother gray turned and headed, full speed, straight for the boat, with the orcas still going at her.

It was right about then, Graner believes, that they got the calf.

"I have a gut feeling," he said. At any rate, he never saw it again.

But most of his attention was on the mother, who had apparently decided to hide under his boat. It was not a good fit: 45-foot whale, 28-foot boat.

Her pursuers kept attacking, and she kept trying to beat them off. But she didn't always hit what she meant to. She hit the boat's outdrive -- the transmission to the propeller -- and broke it off.

"It's attached by solid two-inch brackets of steel," Graner said, "and she just snapped them."

Then she destroyed the swim step -- the platform over the outdrive.

"She hit that on the upstroke," he said, "and the whole thing just exploded."

Meanwhile, her flailing fluke kept sending cascades of water over the boat until everyone was soaked. And as she crashed about, the boat rocked crazily from side to side.

At one point Graner was thrown into the air. At another, his camera was, and when he reached up to catch it, he grabbed a railing and broke it off.

"We were thinking we were going to sink," Graner said. Later he discovered that only a rubber seal under the outdrive brackets kept the water out and prevented that from happening.

Their "absolute terror" lasted more than four minutes until finally the whale slipped out from under the boat again. For a while she just lay next to them, rolling from side to side.

"The killers weren't on her at that point," Graner said, "which is why I think they had the calf."

When he saw the whale coming toward the boat, his first reaction was to turn off the potentially dangerous propeller. So, physically, the mother gray whale seemed to be OK.

Clearly, the boat was not. But other boats in the area soon came to their rescue.

Black went out the next day to see if she could trace what happened to the grays. She didn't see a slick or any other evidence of a kill.

"It's possible they got close enough to shore to escape," she said.

In shallow water, grays can hide in the surf, and it's also harder for killer whales to come at them from all sides.

Jim Harvey, a professor of marine science at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, has worked with gray whales off Baja during their mating season. Females there sometimes try to hide under boats to get away from the males.

So he wasn't surprised by the incident with Graner's boat. The grays are pretty vulnerable, Harvey said, when they're migrating north and trying to cross the bay from Monterey to Santa Cruz.

"A boat is their only potential place to hide," he said.

But Black said she's never heard of a gray disabling a boat. It's unusual enough that it made the "CBS Evening News" on Wednesday.

Killer whales attacking grays is just part of nature, Black and Harvey noted.

"The killers have to eat, too," Black said. "They have to feed their young, too."

Last year was the biggest year for gray whales passing Monterey -- 456 -- since they first started counting in 1994, said Wayne Perryman, a fisheries biologist for NOAA Fisheries.

So far this year, they've counted 340, still a pretty good year.

"But the party's almost over," Perryman said.

Gina Graner seems fairly stoic about her experience. "We were observing this rather brutal thing," she said. "And it was interesting. But then we became part of it, and it got really scary."

Source: The Kansas City Star