Surfer Has Close Encounter With Killer Whale in Norway
Or ... Fox vs Whale as Aussie expat Seamus Fox has a very close encounter with an Orca whilst surfing Norway.
“A killer whale was beelining for me and I just thought, ‘Fuck, this thing is going to hit me. Not eat me, but take me out.’ When I duck dived I was looking at him straight in his eye.”
That was Norwegian-based Aussie surfer Seamus Fox. Fox had grown up in Wollongong, Australia, but after meeting his Norwegian wife-to-be moved near the Arctic Circle 19 years ago. He is part of an enclave in Scandinavia registered by UNICEF as Sexual Refugees. But please, no donations are needed. He owns the country's leading surf retailer Surf Shop No, and is known by his mates as “Cappuccino” such is his constant level of froth.
He was surfing near his home town of Ålesund at one of Norways’s better pointbreaks. With a solid four-to-six-foot swell running, Fox had joined four other mates in the line-up.
He’d caught a wave and was paddling back out when he saw two killer whales, better known as orcas, or spekkhoggers in Norway, breach out the back. Just as the crew in the line-up called out a warning, Fox looked at the incoming four-foot wave heading his way and saw the whales.
“As an Aussie, I’ve seen dolphins do this a 1000 times and you are always so stoked to see them,” Fox said. “But I've never had two massive whales absolutely motoring towards my head. They weren’t going straight, but cutting across the wave, and one was gunning for me.”
The footage is grainy, and all happens so fast, but you can see Fox second from the inside, duck dive when the whales approached. Malene Tenfjord, one of the surfers’ wives, had been returning from a school drop-off and had seen the pod on the other side of the island. She followed them into the bay to warn her husband and managed to capture the footage from the car park.
With the orca making a beeline, that’s when our hero Fox looked the beast in the eye and whilst underwater braced for impact. “It missed me by a bee’s dick and the turbulence felt like a train going past me,” he said. “I popped up and turned to my mate who was 15 yards further in and was like “Did you see that?” His eyeballs were on stalks and he was like, yep, “That was hectic.”
Fox rejoined the line-up and had a debrief with his mates about the next course of action. One, a scientist, who had witnessed the whales three times previously in the line-up, opted to go in. Another, amateur photographer Rune Gausnes, who has been helping researchers by documenting the pod each winter, said that this was the third time a near attack had occurred at the wave.
One of those was also caught on camera. That was in 2021 when South African Shannon Ainslie had been surfing in a competition that was being live streamed and had a close encounter with two orcas. Ainslie has previous; when he was 15 he had been attacked by two four-metre sharks surfing at Nahoon Reef, East London. That was also caught on camera. Funnily enough, he often finds it difficult to find surfing buddies.
There have been very few recordings of wild orcas attacking humans, and no fatalities. The researchers and Fox think that the orcas may have mistaken him, and the others, for seals, and worked out the difference in the last second. While most orca chase herring, this particular pod seems to hunt seals and bigger fish. However, it is all speculation at this stage, and largely irrelevant when you are eyeballing a six-metre, 4000-kilogram mammal travelling at 30 miles per hour.
“Anyway after the scientist went in, a bomb popped up and I just swung instinctively and rode it for a cupla 100 yards,” concludes Fox. “But then I was back in the inside, on my own, shitting myself again. But the whales seemed to have moved on, and the four of us surfed for another few hours. I mean, whaddya supposed to do? It was pumping!”
