IN the turquoise waters off La Ventana, a sleepy coastal town on Mexico’s Baja peninsula, Claudio Rios, 41, monitored the radio of a fishing boat. It was late March.
His eyes scanned the horizon, one hand loose on the wheel as the Sea of Cortez swayed beneath him.
“It smells like orcas,” he said: pungent and oily.
Rios waited for a dorsal fin to slice through the waves. For captains to chatter over the radio. For boat engines to hum together. So far, nothing.
Tourists sat in boats nearby, eyes wide, hoping to spot one of several male orcas named for Aztec gods and emperors: Moctezuma, Cuitlahuac, Tlaloc.
Some humans already had their wet suits on, fins at their feet – prepared to drop into the open water with the ocean’s apex predator.
Swimming with killer whales is one of the rarest wildlife encounters on Earth, done in only two places: La Ventana, Mexico and Skjervoy, Norway.
In both, visitors don wet suits, snorkels and masks to observe the 6m-long animals moving through open water.
Growing crowds, fuelled by social media and a generation that first encountered orcas in captivity or on-screen, are descending on two otherwise quiet coastal towns, bringing money and friction in equal measure.
Researchers still cannot say what sustained human contact does to wild orcas. In neither country has that slowed the industry.
“Everyone will tell you there’s never been an orca attack on humans in the wild,” said Jorge Cervera Hauser, a Mexican underwater photographer who has led tours in Mexico and Norway.
“But they’re highly intelligent animals. With constant pressure, an accident is bound to happen sooner or later.”
Shortly before noon, Rios’ radio crackled. The killer whales were south, close to Bahia de los Muertos.
Rios grabbed the wheel, throttling the engine to life.
The boat tore through the water.
Ten or so dorsal fins broke the surface ahead, black against the sandy beige desert landscape of Baja California Sur.
Rios was among the first to reach the animals, but not by much.
Within minutes of the radio call, white wakes were cutting through the waves. He watched boats come, counting them.
“This thing is like poison,” he said, pointing to the radio.
A killer whale passed beneath the bow, shimmering in the sunlit shallows, its slick body breaking the blue.
Boats jostled for position, some cutting through the orcas’ path. Someone on a neighbouring boat dropped, fins first, into the water before the vessel had fully stopped, but the orcas sped past.
Then a drone, supposedly prohibited during the activity, buzzed overhead.
The orcas were still visible, dark shapes moving away from the noise.
Rios tensed. For years, he had seen boats swarm killer whales – chasing them, harassing them, cutting them off. And now this.
He pulled alongside the neighbouring boat and caught the other captain’s eye.
“Hey,” he said, frustrated but calm, pointing upward. “We’ve got to do things right. We’ve got to do things better.”
January in Skjervoy
Although orcas are commonly associated with cold seas, in Mexico they find a gulf teeming with rich marine life.
They hunt Mobula rays, whales, dolphins, sharks and bone fishes in the waters of the Sea of Cortez.
Last year, in an attempt to regulate the tourism attracted by the opportunity to swim with these animals, Mexico – where “marine safaris” long operated in a legal grey zone – introduced a permit system for tour operators.
Norway, where the practice has been running for several decades, has no comparable rules.
Orcas follow vast herring migrations into the Arctic fjords each winter, arriving between November and January.
The animals behave differently, hunt differently and present different challenges to the humans trying to regulate the industry.
On a morning in January, with the sun barely clearing the snowcapped mountains, Eve Jourdain, 38, led a boat through the choppy dark waters off Skjervoy, a working fishing town and small natural harbour.
Tourists huddled on a rigid inflatable in sub-zero temperatures, faces buried under wool layers.
Jourdain, a marine biologist and director of the Norwegian Orca Survey, was equally bundled; only her eyes and nose were visible above her neon gear. She regularly captains whale-watching tours but never enters the water herself.
Dozens of other boats were already on the water, full of tourists determined to see the killer whales.
Every morning during the season, buses from Tromso unload tourists from across the globe onto the harbour dock.
By the time the sky turns (briefly) pale with light, the fjords are already crowded with inflatables carrying tourists who paid hundreds of dollars to see or snorkel with killer whales.
“This has been my dream since I was a child,” said Yakir Asaraf, a nature photographer who had travelled to Skjervoy to swim with orcas.
Krisztina Balotay, a photographer and whale-watching guide who has worked in the industry for more than 10 years, recalled a time when she and her partner led tours to snorkel with the orcas.
“We intentionally decided to stop because it became too much,” she said.
Even now, some situations upset them so much that she asks her partner, who works as a skipper, to move away from the orcas and snorkellers.
On busy days, small groups of orcas can be surrounded by over 20 boats at once.
Whales also aggregate tightly around large herring fishing vessels; whale‑ watching and snorkel boats seek out the same spots.
Before a distance rule existed, snorkellers were too close to fishing vessels, triggering a regulation around active fishing boats, but not around the animals.
Balotay has boarded herring fishing vessels many times to learn about the fishing operation and animal behaviour.
The Arctic winter limits the hours of operation, but there is no cap on boats, creating intense, unregulated traffic around whales.
A lack of regulations has made the activity unsafe for both humans and animals, Balotay said.
Large whales are not “playmates” for humans, she said.
“Just the sheer size difference can create dangerous situations. Until someone dies here, they will not do anything,” she added. — ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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