She was asleep on her father's small yacht when she woke up.
She spotted a group of orcas on the deck. The steering wheel was moving fast. The sailboat was pushed through 180 degrees and headed in the opposite direction.
The boat was rammed by them. They hit us so many times that we thought it was a coordinated attack.
"I told my dad that I wasn't thinking clearly and that he needed to think for me," the medical student says. He is a very calm and centered person and made me feel safe.
The orcas broke off about 15 minutes after the father and daughter left. Three-quarters of the rudder was broken off, and some metal was bent, as a result of being stuck in the water.
Some sailboats have had to be towed into port after orcas destroyed their rudders because losing steering at sea is a serious matter. The Storksons had enough of their rudder left to limp into Brest, France, for repairs. Their plan to sail around the world was temporarily derailed by the incident.
There is no record of a human being being killed by an orca. Last month, two boats were sunk by orcas off the coast of Portugal, in the worst such encounter since authorities have tracked them.
The incident involving the Storksons is an outlier according to the president of the group. It wasn't near the Strait of Gibraltar or the coast of Portugal or Spain.
There is a dilemma. Scientists have thought that only a few animals are involved in these encounters and that they are all from the same area.
He admits that he doesn't understand what happened there. It is too far away. I don't think the orcas would come back after a few days up there.
In the past two years, these encounters have been getting the attention of sailors and scientists alike, as their frequencies seem to be increasing. The orcas seem to be attracted to a boat's rudder according to sailing magazines and websites. A group on Facebook has been set up to trade personal reports of boat- orca encounters. There are a lot of dramatic videos on the internet.
The scientists theorize that the water pressure produced by the boat's propeller is similar to that of the orcas. De Stephanis thinks that they are asking for the propeller to be in the face. They broke the rudder when they encountered a sailboat that wasn't running its engine.
Martin Evans had an experience when he was helping to deliver a sailboat from Ramsgate to Greece.
Evans and his crew mates were just shy of entering the Strait of Gibraltar, but they were also running the boat's engine with the propeller to boost their speed.
Evans couldn't hold on to the steering wheel as it moved so violently that he couldn't see anything.
He remembers asking "Jesus, what's this?". The bus was moving it. I looked to the side and saw the killer whale.
The rudder was visible on the surface.
There is a small population of orcas along the Spanish and Portuguese coast. According to the director of Bay Cetology in British Columbia, the damage to boats is being done by a few juvenile males.
He says that there is something about moving parts that makes them excited. They're focused on the rudders.
De Stephanis says that if a small number of orcas is involved, they may just outgrow the behavior. The young males will have less time to play with sailboats as they get older.
He thinks it's a game. It will most likely stop when they have their own life.
In orca society, such games tend to go out of style. He says there are juvenile males who interact with prawn and crab traps. It's been a fad for a while.
Something else was in fashion back in the 1990s for orcas. They would kill fish and then swim with them. We do not see that anymore.
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