azwhales
What a wonderful day! The sea looked like a mirror and the sun is no longer shy (do not forget to bring your sunscreen to prevent sunburns if you want to go on a whale and dolphin watching tour with us!). Even the animals were very calm on the surface, enjoying the good weather.
 |
| A Portuguese man-o-war |
We started our morning tour with several sperm whales scattered a few miles off Ponta Delgada. We’ve been seeing this group in the last few days.
With the amount of animals present, we decided to spread our boats to bother them the least possible, and one of our boats had an amazing surprise … a sperm whale breaching … twice!
The other vessels also get very good sightings with a lot of sperm whales tails.
To finish the morning, we found a very nice and calm group of bottlenose dolphins that were accompanying us to the bow with some show-off jumps.
And such a nice afternoon we had! These sperm whales look like that they never had a full stomach, all the time going for feeding dives. They were spending a long time underwater, more than they usually do. The normal feeding dive time in the Azores is 40 – 50 minutes per dive. But at the end we could see them, and we were with two individuals that showed the tail at the same time again, like yesterday. On top of that, we could see another sperm whale that was close to the first ones we spotted.
Later on, we went to a group of Risso’s dolphins, this group is the one that we know really well thanks to photo-ID registers in São Miguel since 2009. They had some babies, maybe that means that we will see a lot of Risso’s dolphins in the future!
azwhales
Futurismo Biologists Team
Sandrina Rodrigues
