Today was one of those days when Nature shows how amazing it can be!
The day started sunny and windless, perfect sea and visibility. In sum, the perfect day to go whale watching! The animals agreed and decided to come greet our guests.
In the morning 2 friendly fin whales, one adult and one juvenile, were very relaxed close to our boat. The juvenile even turned on its side and showed its beautiful white lower jaw.
Next, Filipe, our lookout, guided the boats to a magnificent Blue whale. Like the fin whales, Blue whales are on their annual migration to their feeding grounds in the North Atlantic. We hadn’t seen the Blue whales for two weeks so we were starting to think they had abandoned the area already. Thankfully, they are still around and we hope we will see them many more times!
As if calling for attention, while we were with the Blue whale, a big group of Striped dolphins started jumping not too far away! As always, these elegant and fast dolphins kept us moving fast and admiring their acrobacies.
Nature continued to surprise us and in the afternoon we saw again the fin whales which were resting, taking a breath and sinking just below the surface. They were hanging around our boat and we could follow them easily being their shadow visible all the time. However, the real surprise of the day were the short-finned pilot whales, the first of this 2017 season! Do you know that pilot whales are actually dolphins? Well, quite large dolphins considering that adult males can reach 7 meters in length! We then saw Risso’s and common dolphins and two sea turtles.
Short-finned pilot whales / Globicephala macrorhynchus
During our swimming with dolphins tour we were also lucky! We could swim with 2 lovely groups of common dolphins, with many new borns ! And, after a while, we spotted Risso´s dolphins just in front of the boat so we did a try and it was successfull ! 😀 It is rare to swim with them, they are usually shy so each time we can do it, we enjoy 🙂
sightings! 😀 Stay tuned!
|
Your thoughts on this?