After some grey days, we headed out this morning with a blue sky on the sea 😀
Risso’s dolphins were just in front of the marina to wish us a “good morning”. The group was having breakfast, what better than squid to start a day? 😉 Mothers were training their calves to dive and hunt by themselves, supervised by a huge male.
Risso’s dolphins – Mother and her calf – Sweet morning 🙂
Although my Portugues is little and I am trying to improve it, I was able to understand Filipe, our lookout, saying at the radio “baleia de barba! Baleia de barba!”. It meant that we had a baleen whale outside. So, let’s go for it!! It was probably the same whale as yesterday afternoon, and today we were able to confirm the species: it was a sei whale. With Nuno the skipper, we checked the GPS and we realized that, the whale was circling around the boat. This is a sign it was foraging as well as Risso’s dolphins earlier, but it feeds on krill, not on squid.
sei whale – It has 1 bridge on the head, Bryde’s whale as 3 : one in the middle like the sei whale, and 1 on each side of the upper jaw. These bridge permit to do the difference between those 2 species.
Tall and erect dorsal fine of a sei whale
As we were far from the coast, 17 miles, we were almost sure to cross the way of another kind of life before to go around Ilhéu… Atlantic spotted dolphins were of course around! We met a huge and beautiful group composed by minimum 200 individuals, adults, juveniles and of course new fresh born babies 🙂 They were travelling, surrounded by Cory’s shearwaters, probably they all smelt fish no far from there.
Atlantic spotted dolphins travelling to the South East of the island
Atlantic spotted dolphin with TA III
At the same time they couldn’t stop playing and jumping around us. In the afternoon we found again this huge group of spotted dolphins composed by subgroups which were socializing, so there was a lot of interaction and body contact among individuals. The Cory’s shearwaters were already tired after the morning feeding frenzy and most of them were resting at the surface.
Active mother and baby Atlantic spotted dolphins!
Atlantic spotted dolphin so playful!
Let’s see when they will leave the Azores this year. Usually, in October, most of them are gone, so what are you waiting to come to visit them with us?
Striped dolphins were also very active today, well as usual! Since they were mostly porpoising the encounter with them was really dynamic 😀
