Swimming with Norway’s killer whales

“Wait! Wait! Wait!”

These were the commands of the skipper of the tiny boat in which I was bobbing around the frigid waters of the Norwegian Sea in January, 300 miles inside the Arctic Circle. I had one leg over the side. A few metres away, a scimitar-shaped black fin, the height of a man, broke the surface and disappeared again. Then another.

“Wait! Wait!”

I checked my equipment, running my glove-clad fingers around the rubber neck seal of my dry suit, and then over my tight neoprene hood, which was compressing the exposed bits of my face into a permanent scowl. My snorkel and mask seemed secure.

“Wait!”

I had been waiting for this moment for three frustrating days. But now that the wait was almost over, all I wanted to do was carry on waiting. The skipper was positioning the boat so that we could jump directly into the path of the planet’s apex marine predator.

I had seen film of this animal smashing penguins 80ft in the air with its tail for fun, or beaching itself to grab seals with its enormous, razor-sharp teeth. Great white sharks fled from it in terror. Its Latin name suggests that it belongs in the realm of the dead; its English name, usefully, as a guide to humans contemplating swimming with it, even contains the word killer.

“Go!”

Bugger.

“Go! Go! Go!”

Three days earlier, I had arrived in Skjervoy, just north of the 70th parallel, after a four-hour ferry ride from Tromso, site of the nearest major airport, 55 nautical miles (or 150 driving miles) to the south-west.

Skjervoy, on the tiny island of Skjervoya, had been just another small sleepy fishing village in the Norwegian Arctic, until October 2017, when locals woke up to discover that their nearby fjord, Kvænangen, was suddenly roiling with hundreds and hundreds of humpback whales and Orcinus orca, or killer whales, never before seen in those parts in such huge numbers.

The vast herring shoals had abandoned their previous overwintering grounds just off Tromso and migrated north. The whales that fed on them had followed. Overnight, Skjervoy had become a Klondike for marine biologists and whale-watching tourists alike, one of the best places in the world to get up close to these remarkable animals.

I’d walked from the ferry, crunching through the snow, an immense wolf moon looming over Skjervoy, and clambered aboard the S/Y Kallinika, a 25m steel sloop moored in the harbour that would be my base for the next three days as we tried to track down the orca and, hopefully, snorkel with them.

Among the crew was Tiu Simila, a marine biologist who has helped pioneer the study of orca in northern Norway. Also on board was Audun Rikardsen, a professor in marine biology at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromso and one of the world’s leading photographers of cetaceans.

This was part of a new initiative pairing scientists and tourists: visitors gain detailed knowledge of these animals and their importance to the marine ecosystem, and hopefully become advocates for their protection; the scientists, by encouraging tourists to send them their photographs and film of whale encounters, gain useful research material.

“We think the humpbacks left last week for their spawning grounds in the Caribbean,” Tiu, 59, told me over a glass of whisky. “But there are still plenty of orca around.”

Finding them, however, would not be so easy. This became apparent the next morning when we set off in a small boat in the crepuscular light that, at this latitude in January, where the sun never appeared above the horizon, gave you just a five-hour window of twilight before the polar night turned everything black again.

As we headed out into the waters of Kvænangsfjord, framed by jagged, ice-encrusted black mountains, it seemed inconceivable we might find our quarry in its vastness.

The orca is the largest member of the dolphin family — adult males can be nine metres long and weigh as much as eight tonnes. The pods, formed of some 10-25 family members, stay together for life, headed up by a strong matriarch, who can live for as long as 90 years. Males live to about 45. After menopause, a female orca becomes a “grandmother” to younger pod members.

As we scanned the fjord, Tiu told me about the orca. They have a complex social structure, with each family group having its own dialect to avoid inbreeding, and co-operate during hunting, rounding up herring by terrifying them into a ball (called carousel feeding, this is like “an underwater ballet”, according to Tiu) before slapping the fish with their tail flukes and eating their stunned prey, delicately, one by one.

“There is one orca we call Stumpy,” Tiu told me. “He has a deformed dorsal fin, so he can’t dive to feed. The others drop herring in front of him so he can eat.”

Maybe, she said, that is why the orca, known as the “wolves of the sea” because of their family groups, seem to fascinate humans so much. “They remind us of ourselves,” she said. “They can be brutal but also sensitive and gentle.”

In the distance were some boats, their fishing lights pinpricks in the gloom, attended by a dense squabble of wheeling herring gulls, and two white-tailed sea eagles, Europe’s largest raptor, with a wingspan of two metres, orbiting like languid satellites around them.

Orca have learnt that fishing boats mean a free meal — they pick off herring squeezed out of the nets — to the extent that, when they hear the winches being pulled in, they head smartly for the boats. Thus so did we.

Sadly, in a heartbeat the wind shifted to the east. Within minutes, the sea was twisted and confused, a ceaseless clamour, with freezing water crashing over the bow, our little boat violently rocking and shuddering. Such is the tempestuous nature of weather in the Arctic. Suddenly, not seeing orca seemed preferable to not seeing my breakfast again. We headed back to port.

That night on the Kallinika, with a storm rattling the rigging outside in the polar night, we had fenalar — leg of lamb salted, dried and cured for a year (such preserved meat was one of the keys to the Vikings’ success in travelling the world) and served thinly sliced, like jamón ibérico.

This was followed by pinnekjott, northern Norway’s traditional Christmas meal, in which cured mutton ribs were soaked for 30 hours to remove the sea salt before being steamed and served with swede purée, boiled potatoes and a spoonful of blood-red lingonberry jam. All accompanied by an inexhaustible supply of aquavit, that fiery caraway-seed-infused grain alcohol (undoubtedly another key to Viking success).

After dinner, Audun gave a presentation of his orca photographs, including his most celebrated one, of a submerged male beside a trawler (shown top), with the waterline splitting the frame so that the massive cetacean and the boat fill half the picture each.

He talked about his upbringing close to the nearby Lofoten Islands, in a whaling family, when hunting whales, including orca, was still legal. (It was banned under the International Whaling Commission’s 1986 moratorium. Today, Norway still hunts the minke whale under an “objection” to the IWC ban.)

Audun spoke of the herring, the main keystone species of the Arctic, how overfishing in the 1950s and 1960s led to a collapse in their numbers and those of the animals that predated on them, and how a temporary ban in the late 1970s restored herring numbers.

He talked about the restored, billions-strong herring shoals, called the “silver of the sea” for the many communities they sustained, how nobody really knew for sure why they suddenly changed their migration patterns back in 2017, but that waters warming because of climate change — Arctic air temperatures are rising at twice the global rate — seemed to be pushing many animal species further and further north.

For the orca, the recovery of herring stocks had been a mixed blessing. With oceans full of the now-illegal but slow-decomposing industrial toxins polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), initially absorbed by plankton, then eaten by herring and in turn eaten by the killer whales, the orca are among the most exposed animals in the world to the pollutants. The toxins were stored in the fat of the whales and passed to the calves through the mother’s milk.

“Many groups of orca are predicted to die out in the next 50-100 years,” Audun said.

On top of all that was the relentless search for oil. In the very week I was there, the government granted more than 30 new oil-production licences in the Norwegian and Barents seas.

“This is why scientists and tourists coming together is so important,” said Tiu. “Orca are great ambassadors for the oceans and getting people to care. You can connect with these intelligent, social animals, learn about their current struggles and meet them in their own environment. It is a very emotional experience for most people who get to see them.”

‘Go!’ the skipper shouted. I slipped into the water. An immense shape came into view, moving towards me

Photographs. Testimonies. It was so frustrating, being so close to these incredible animals yet unable to see them. That frustration spanned the next day too, my penultimate day in Skjervoy, as we spent the twilight hours out on the water; Audun, at 6ft 5in, like a watchtower, looking in vain for signs of orca in the deranged sea, the monochrome world doing nothing to lighten my mood.

“The orca may have left, following the herring,” Audun said, as we turned again for the harbour. “Around here, it’s the herring that run the show.”

By breakfast on my last day, I was resigned to the fact that I would be heading home disappointed. Then the Kallinika’s radio crackled into life. One of the spotter boats out in the fjord had found a family of orca. We scrambled into our dry suits . . . 

“Go!” the skipper shouted again. I slipped into the water and looked down into the abyss. It was as clear as cut glass, albeit, in this twilight world, tinted glass, its four degrees (the universally recommended temperature for a fridge) instantly numbing the exposed parts of my face.

For a few seconds, nothing happened, I just floated in space. And then an immense black-and-white shape came into view, moving towards me — a male orca, one of the outriders ahead of the group, like Praetorian guards, alert for trouble. I could see his large bovine eye behind his front white patch, as he seemed to assess me before swimming on.

And then the family appeared: about 12 animals, brilliant-white patches dancing around like spotlights illuminating the night sky at a film premiere.

There was a mother and her calf, swimming tightly alongside her. I remembered Audun telling me that such an intimate encounter with these animals, these gentle giants, these apex killers, could evoke a sense of delight and dread. That felt about right, as I watched the tail fluke of the last orca fade into the black.

Compared with the experience of other visitors earlier in the season, when they had witnessed breaching and the “underwater ballet” of carousel feeding, and had long, lingering interactions in the water with the orca, my encounter had been brief. But it was still one of the most magical things I had ever seen.

Back on the boat, we followed the dorsal fins and arched backs as they headed north, towards the open sea, and I wondered whether these animals would return next winter to Skjervoy. And I thought about the day when they might not return at all, neither here nor anywhere else, as I watched the last fin vanish into a curtain of snow draped across the fjord.

Follow @FTLifeArts on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Listen to our culture podcast, Culture Call, where editors Gris and Lilah dig into the trends shaping life in the 2020s, interview the people breaking new ground and bring you behind the scenes of FT Life & Arts journalism. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen.