A beautiful day in the company of whales!

We started our day with a nice surprise 😀 while on our way to see some fin whales spotted by Filipe, two beaked whales popped up and gifted us with their calm presence. Usually elusive and difficult to see, these two individuals surfaced several times before taking a deep dive. One of them had a large notch on the dorsal fin’s trailing edge.

We then reached the fin whales, which we were able to observe also in the afternoon tour while surface feeding. Baleen whales were once thought fasting during their migration period, but this is not the case. They in fact can take advantage of food patches as it occurs in the Azores and as we observed today.

A humpback whale was also feeding close to the coast, taking shallow dives without showing its fluke and surfacing once at the time. Luckily for us, baleen whales are not deep divers meaning they don’t stay underwater for too long, so we had the chance to see this whale diving and surfacing several times 🙂

We also saw some dolphins from distance while on our way to the humpback, a sea turtle and of course Cory’s shearwaters 🙂

Unfortunately tomorrow the weather is not going to collaborate, so we will keep the memory of these sightings and wait for better conditions

 

Arianna Cecchetti

About Arianna Cecchetti

Arianna is a Marine Biologist and was Main Guide at TERRA AZUL since 2009, and Technical & Scientific Director until 2018. Originally from Italy, she sees herself more as a world citizen. Arianna deserves the very best, and we hope she can come back to share her passion for the sea with us again.

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