Cautious sailors are shaking the boat to keep the orcas from doing so.
As killer whales continue to attack ships off Spain and Portugal, some enterprising sailors have come up with an unlikely way to keep Free Willy at bay: blasting heavy metal music in the water.
The unlikely supposed deterrent of orcas emerged recently in the Facebook group “Orca Attack Reports,” which is dedicated to reporting cases of whale piracy against humans.
While killer whale attacks on boats have been documented since 2020, clashes have increased in both frequency and ferocity, with Shamus lately sending several boats to the bottom of the sea.
In the most recent incident, on October 31, a pod of killer whales brutally sank a Polish yacht off the coast of Morocco after a 45-minute attack.
So, like the intrepid shark hunters in “Jaws,” the beleaguered sailors have been resorting to unlikely measures to keep these ship-ramming giants, which they shared among the aforementioned group’s nearly 60,000 followers, at bay.
These defense tactics involved everything from using horns and putting sand in the water to poking orcas’ noses with boat rudders, CBS reported.
“Any movement that makes that action uncomfortable will deter them,” declared one poster while describing this latest Free Willy repellent. “I just moved the rudder pretty violently so they wouldn’t want to stick their nose in there. It worked instantly and they got bored quickly!
Perhaps the most unique revelation that emerged was that Shamu is apparently not a heavy metal fan.
This came to light when a poster picked the group’s brains on how to defend themselves from orcas as they traveled from Malaga to the Canary Islands.
“When we had an interaction last year, I’m pretty sure that vibrating the helmet by playing Eastern European thrash metal at full volume [a subgenre of heavy metal], was the deciding factor,” one respondent recalled in the comments. “We also went aft. They made three approaches and left at 5 [minutes] without doing any harm… which was 2 or 3 minutes into the music. Good luck.”
In other words, sick riffs apparently save ships.
Although before setting sail on the high seas blowing up Megadeath, people should know that this supposed metal trick doesn’t work for everyone.
In an interview with the New York Times, sailor Florian Rutsch recounted an unfortunate encounter with an orca in November, during which he attempted to blast a Spotify playlist called “Metal for Orcas.” through an underwater speaker.
This attempt at underwater sensory overload failed after the beefy buccaneers attacked the rudder of their ship, after which the crew had to be rescued by Spanish authorities.
It is not known if he encountered a unique pod of hard rock-loving whales.
Unfortunately, scientists are still a long way from figuring out why orcas, which eat fish and marine mammals, are attacking ships in the first place.
Some speculate that these could be copycat revenge attacks sparked by an incident in which the ship rammed an orc matriarch.
The most frightening thing is that this behavior appears to be passed down generationally, perhaps indicating that, like humans, the species has a propensity for revenge.
Although some scientists posit that orca behavior is more playful, similar to when orcas in the Pacific Northwest were observed wearing salmon on their heads like fish hats.
