It was a sunshiny, easygoing day with a nice breeze for the yacht BrunelSunergy on the first leg of the 1997-98 Whitbread Race (the precursor to the Volvo Ocean Race). The team was enjoying the sight of humpback whales just ahead, but then the scene fell apart.

“It moved very quickly from ‘Hey, look. How nice, there’s a whale over there,’ to complete panic and ‘Listen, we’ve got a problem,’” says crewmember Arend van Bergeijk.

The biggest whale in the bunch of about 15 decided to show the boat who was king of the sea. “It actually swam toward us, rubbed against the keel and then went full-on into the rudder,” says van Bergeijk.

BrunelSunergy had to make a pit stop in Brazil to repair a damaged rudder and dropped to last place, but the situation could have been much worse. Other Whitbread boats have suffered more severe damage, and whale collisions have even been known to sink boats.

In the 1989-90 race, the Charles Jourdan suffered a hole in its hull after a whale collision, and a sperm whale sunk the whaleship Essex in 1820, an event that inspired the novel Moby Dick.

Whale collisions will be a threat throughout the Volvo Ocean Race, particularly on the second leg (map), when competitors will be crossing some of the planet’s key whale migration routes.

Numerous humpbacks and other whales will be heading down from the southern Indian Ocean to Antarctic seas to spend the Southern Hemisphere summer gorging on tiny shrimplike crustaceans called krill.

Amazingly, humpbacks, which can grow to 50 feet (15 meters) long and can weigh 40 tons, appear to do most or all of their eating for the year while down south.

For the winter they typically head back north to mate or give birth in the southern Indian Ocean. That’s a trip in the neighborhood of 1,500 miles (2,410 kilometers), but at least one humpback has traveled 5,000 miles (8,050 kilometers) in one season—all the way from Antarctica to South America’s Colombia.

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