Orcas enjoy a lazy lunch on the river

All it needs is the famous duh, duh music from Jaws. A seal, sitting on a rock in the middle of the Clyde, realises it is being hunted by a killer whale.

It belonged to an orca pod, made up of at least five animals including a bull, three females and a calf, which was first seen heading up river off the Ayrshire coast yesterday lunchtime.

And later in the day they were seen off Wemyss Bay, Dunoon and Helensburgh – the furthest up river they’ve been in 30 years.

Dunoon photographer Grant Gillon captured stunning pictures of the pod hunting off the Cowal coast.

He saw one of the orcas catch a seal in its mouth as a crowd of over 50 people gathered to watch from the shore.

He said: “I spotted them coming d own the Cl y d e just b e f o re lunchtime.

“They were teaching their calf to hunt.

“My daughter thought it was very exciting.”

Meanwhile a video, posted on social media by ferry passenger Lindsay Moss, showed the pod getting close to a Western Ferries vessel heading to Gourock over lunchtime.

She said it had been a “special moment” to see them up close.

Experts say sightings of killer whales so far up the Clyde are extremely rare.

David Nairn, from the Clyde Porpoise marine mammal project said: “It’s rare for them to come up into the main part of the Clyde there.

“They’re looking for seals and porpoises.

“We have so many porpoises on the Clyde that it’s open season for catching them.

“There are reports also that they’ve eaten a seal, and one of our spotters said it looks like they’re teaching their young how to hunt.

“It’s really cool that they’re up here, really exciting.”

He said he’d alerted the coastguard and Faslane submarine base about the whales being in the area.

Pippa Garrard, of the Hebridean Whale & Dolphin Trust, said: “These sightings are really rare.

“To put it into perspective, since we started collating community sightings more than a decade ago, there have been fewer than a handful of killer whale encounters reported in and around the Clyde.”

The highly mobile mammals can travel at speeds of up to 35mph, and are extremely intelligent.

Migratory pods of the animals are found off Scotland’s north and eastern coasts, following mackerel and herring shoals.

But on the west coast, there are thought to be up to ten resident all year round, known as the West Coast Community.

Sightings of them have been mostly off Arran and southern Ayrshire. However it is thought that yesterday’s pod belong to a group known as the Nor ther n Isles Community, that moves between Iceland and Scotland.

According to experts, the largest orca ever measured was a 30ft long male, but those in Scottish waters are usually closer to 21ft long.

The Clyde pod are just the latest exotic maritime visitors to Scotland.

In January a photographer caught a humpback whale spectacularly breaching the surface of the water in the Firth of Forth.

A number of the huge mammals had been seen in the estuary over that weekend.

Meanwhile last month a walrus was even was spotted in the Orkney islands and was photographed on the island of Sanday.