How to say goodbye to 2020? Going whale watching!

This year is almost ending so Futurismo took the chance to visit the ocean in 2020 one more time. Not much after the sunrise, with almost no wind a small international group decided to leave the harbor. It was beautiful to see the sea slightly rippled and only when we came back the weather changed for stronger winds and rain in the distance. But we could enjoy our tour from the start to the end.

The fabulous mixture on board from Bermuda over Iran to Spain to sights in the water from Common Dolphins over Boarfish to Bottlenose Dolphins and in the air from Yellow legged Seagulls to Kittiwakes was great. It was a pleasure to observe the different behaviors of the two dolphin species which offered us four opportunities to do so. At the beginning we had seen the steadily fast swimming Common Dolphins traveling east and as we went further there was suddenly an other group of the same species inspecting us closely and we could well compare our size with the big adults surrounding our zodiac boat. So we found out that we are small compared to them, but not to long after we witnessed how small they are compared to the Bottlenose Dolphins, which also checked out our group on board. Acompaigning us even when we made the intent to leave. They kept a close eye on us turning their bodies side wards and followed us effortlessly. Through the calm water surface we clearly saw all their perfect imperfections from scratches to marks as well as from above, out of the water. A curious one, which followed us regularly in the bow, was a familiar individual with a deformed upper jaw, which we named Mr. Grey. We don’t know why he looks like this but with this deformation the teeth from it’s lower jaw are exposed and there are parasites on its beak.

Nevertheless it looks like he has a good life out there in the wild open ocean and we meet his pod regularly and recognize it easily because of him. It was fun watching all this dolphins of a big wide spread group interacting with each others and us. Doing leaps, head slaps, tailslaps and a lot of socializing and vocalizing. They followed us further out bow riding and shortly after they were gone the third group of Common Dolphins approached, which seemed to be small again after the big guys (males and females, which some of them showed us their body underside to confirm the gender). When we then put our hydrophone into the water to check for sperm whales we still heard the whistles of all the dolphins we met before and went back to land with a big smile under our face masks and marvelous experiences in our heart and mind. You like to join us too? Be warmly welcomed maybe still this year o definitely in 2021!