The rudders of a British sailor’s boat were torn off by orcas in the Strait of Gibraltar, the latest of numerous killer whale occurrences in the area in recent weeks.

Iain Hamilton is currently stranded in Gibraltar, a British Overseas Territory on Spain’s south coast, after being attacked by a pod of five orcas, he told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” program on Monday.

He claimed that when he noticed a fin close to his boat and a series of additional jerky shocks, he was sailing 20 miles west of the shore.

“There was a very large whale pushing along the back of the boat, trying to bite the rudder,” he told BBC Radio 4, adding that the large orca and four smaller killer whales continuously crashed against the yacht.

“Then one of them managed to take off the rudder,” he said.

It was “quite concerning” for Hamilton to be left with only one rudder, but things became even worse when the second rudder was ripped off.

“We had no mechanism for steering the boat,” he explained. The orcas, according to Hamilton, “pushed us around like rag dolls.”

The sailor told Radio 4 that the orcas were “almost playful” rather than threatening and that they had the strength to demolish his vessel swiftly if they wanted to.

According to the radio program, he also stated that the killer whales swam in a manner that appeared “choreographed, almost like synchronized swimming.”

“They seemed to be playing with the rudders and just inadvertently rendering the boat very vulnerable and in a fairly dangerous situation,” Hamilton explained in the interview.

It is unknown when the attack stopped or how the yacht returned to land.

Hamilton went on to tell Radio 4 that the scale of orca assaults in the Strait of Gibraltar is far larger than one might assume, citing the Atlantic Orca Working Group’s findings of 20 instances involving killer whales in the region in the last month alone.