The skipper of L'ORCA drove up to Victoria to our awards lunch and gave a first hand account of the encounter with the whale.

About 30 minutes into the race Jerry had just set a spinnaker (rare downwind start in the Oregon Offshore) and called the crew back to the cockpit. His son was driving and let out a loud, "Holy S**T!". Jerry looked up just in time to see this 30 foot whale breaching out of the water and up to about the first spreaders. It rolled on to its back (probably because it was just as surprised as the crew and was trying to get out of the way) and fell on the starboard side, into the shrouds and foredeck. It brought the rig down and rolled the boat 90 degrees to port. Everyone scrambled to stay on board. After the whale slid off, the boat popped back up.

Jerry said the crew was great and immediately set to work clearing the rig.

Image below is a barnacle, skin and blubber that were scraped off the whale and were left on deck.

We heard the Mayday (at the time, the crew believed the hull had cracked) and I've got to tell you, there is nothing more electrifying. We were about a mile downwind from them. By that time there were about 4 boats helping out, so we didn't see much point in dropping our spinnaker and beating back upwind to help.

The four boats who helped got time redresses from 15 to 60 minutes.

Consensus is that the whale was a Humpback and simply had no idea the boat was there. A sailboat running downwind in heavy seas would be hard to hear (it was blowing 25 knots and we were just off the Columbia River bar where the chop is pretty bad).

-tk

BTW, we were fourth to finish, correcting out to 10th.