Sperm Whales Hit Voyaging Crew in South Pacific

The chances of getting hit by a sperm whale while voyaging on a yacht in the South Pacific are low, but never zero.

Jemma Cooper, 57, Jeremy Cooper, 59, Terry Hetherington, 58, and Martin Jaffré, 28, were the crew aboard a 52-foot-yacht. The vessel started sailing across the seas from Nadi, a city in Fiji that the Coopers spent the last three months in. They were headed towards Opua, a city in New Zealand 1,100 nautical miles away. The journey was estimated to take six to eight days. However, on September 26th, the fourth day of their trip, the ship’s rudder got jammed after a pod of sperm whales rammed into the vessel.

At the time, Ms. Cooper had been steering. There was a thud, and suddenly, the ship’s wheel locked. “I looked out to the port side, and along with the other members, we saw a pod of whales,” she said.

The yacht’s starboard side had been struck; water began pouring in several cracks that had formed.

while Ms. Cooper and Mr. Hetherington used bilge pumps, a type of machine that sucks unwanted water out of a ship, to bail water out.

Rather than responding with panic and fear, Mr. Hetherington stated that he “never felt like [his] life was in danger” and was more astonished that they had been hit by a whale than that they might be sinking.

However, after hours of working, the bilge pumps stopped removing water properly and it became clear that bailing water out by hand wasn’t going to cut it.

“It was now impossible to fix the situation,” Mr. Jaffré said. The ship’s bow was sinking, the water reached knee-height, and the closest land was 200 nautical miles away.

The crew launched an orange life raft and abandoned their yacht.

Maritime New Zealand’s Rescue Coordination Center received note of the distress signal. Flight Lt. Stuart Glendinning flew a P-8A Poseidon out as part of the search-and-rescue mission. Once they were located, the Lt. Glendinning enlisted the help of a private vessel, the Supreme, and a container ship, the M.V. Sofrana Surville, both of which were over 100 nautical miles away, to rescue the crew of four.

In total, the crew had been stranded for over 18 hours.