‘It Looked Like Moby Dick’ : Yacht Crew Tells of Whale Attack, 7-Hour Ordeal at Sea

Moments before the great beast struck, Mark Felix could see a stupendous spout rising above the waves, a 50-foot geyser.

It was, the 20-year sailing veteran and former whale-watching guide recalled, the largest whale he had seen in his life.

And it was about to ram a hole in the 57-foot yacht with Felix at the controls.

“It looked more like a tornado than a waterspout,” he said. “It was at least 50 feet high, which means the whale was probably twice that big. It was a whale of a whale. It looked like Moby Dick to me.”

The huge finback whale suddenly rammed the wooden Chriscraft yacht, the Lady Ruth, punching a jagged hole in its bow that sent the cold Pacific waters crashing in on the terrified three-man crew.

“The impact was like hitting an immense rock with some rubber coating around it,” recalled Charles Gray, 30, one of the crewmen. “It stopped the boat dead in its tracks. It even lifted it out of the water.”

Within 45 minutes, the crew had abandoned the sinking ship and piled into a rubber life raft for what was to be a harrowing afternoon adrift at sea.

After seven hours scanning the horizon for ships and yelling at the whales who had stayed around, the crew was rescued by a Coast Guard cutter on routine patrol.

On Monday, all three were back home in San Diego, trying to explain what experts have called one of the rarest incidents to occur at sea--an unprovoked whale attack.

Felix was one of three crewmen hired to deliver the 25-year-old yacht from San Diego to Discovery Bay in the Sacramento River Delta on Saturday when the trio came upon a pod of finback whales 40 miles off the coast of Monterey, traveling in the same direction. For several hours they saw 25 to 30 finback whales, which can grow to 70 feet long.

At first the whales, traveling in family groups of three or four, were little more than a distraction. Until the attack, the whales came no closer than half a mile.

“Just before the whale hit, I saw the huge spout and another smaller spout,” recalled Felix, 39. “It could have been a mother who rammed us because we got too close to her calf.”

Two whale experts Monday offered varying explanations for the attack.

“It’s very rare,” said Graham Worthy, a whale research biologist at UC Santa Cruz. “But whales have been known to attack before.”

Before federal laws prohibited onlookers from getting so close, gray whales had been known to ram or topple small boats that wandered too close in Scammons Lagoon in Baja California, hesaid.

“Their mating instincts are pretty strong,” Worthy said. “If anything came between a mother and her calf, she’d feel threatened and she’d probably attack.

“But this sinking sounds to me a more severe result than expected. It could have been a lucky hit by the whale.”

Dan Byrne of the Cousteau Society in Los Angeles said that the boat’s wooden construction may have sent confusing signals to the whale, thereby provoking the attack.

He said that at least four whale attacks that have occurred within a 500-mile radius of the Galapagos Islands in the South Pacific in the past 20 years, including an incident last month in which a Florida couple remained adrift for 88 days after being attacked by a pod of whales.

Each of the incidents had one thing in common, he said. The boats were made of wood, rather than fiberglass or some other material.

“I’ve never heard of an attack so far north off the coast of California,” Byrne said.