Snorkelling with orcas (killer whales) in Skjervøy, Northern Norway: Ambivalent encounters in a crowded tourism space

Abstract

The opportunity to snorkel with orcas (killer whales) near the Norwegian Arctic town of Skjervøy is unparalleled globally, due to the absence of regulations prohibiting the activity, requiring licenses, or limiting the number of boats. Since 2017, the annual arrival of orcas and other large whale species in winter has been attracting increasing numbers of tourists, leading to crowding and sometimes risky situations at sea that are described as a ‘wild west’. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Skjervøy across two winter seasons, the article first describes how whale watching emerged in this low-regulation context, and the consequences of the growing popularity of snorkelling activities. Second, it examines tourists’ self-reported responses to their snorkelling experiences, revealing that many people see encounters with wild orcas as a form of redemption or apology for the ways that humans have mistreated the species, particularly in captivity. The embodied experience of immersion in orcas’ Arctic habitat begins a process of recontextualisation, whereby a species understood to have suffered at human hands is imagined anew according to principles of freedom and autonomy. For other tourists, their awe at the opportunity to observe orcas up close is complicated by feelings of unease about their role in a sometimes-chaotic activity that can disturb the whales, shaped by the experience of sharing the sea space with numerous other tourists and boats. In the final section, the article suggests that these ‘ambivalent encounters’ undermine their hopes for a benign form of human-whale encounter, as the crowding creates an image of humans ‘chasing’ the whales.