Out of the mist

Today we woke up to a foggy day. From land we could barely see the ocean. These were not very good news for our lookouts. The better the visibility the easier to sight the animals at sea. But this did not stop our lookouts from finding common dolphins. That’s how we started our tours, heading out to see this unique species of dolphins.

The weather wasn’t perfect, it was raining a little bit, but that did not stop everyone from joining us on our search for cetaceans. As we were getting close to the area where the common dolphins where, we could see the white splash created from their movements on the water. As we got closer, we could see more and more individuals, around 60, at least. Adults, juveniles and calves!

Although seen very frequently throughout the year, it’s always wonderful to sight such a big and diverse family. Curious, some came towards the boat and did some bow riding with us. Others were milling around, always changing directions. What a delight for everyone on board.

It was time to leave the dolphins, one of our boats had something bigger on sighting! Something that like the common dolphins is resident to the Azores. Sperm whales! A female sperm whale, this time. Probably back from a foraging and hunting dive, this female was resting on the surface.

For 10 min it allowed us to enjoy her company and learn a lot about this species and their presence in the Azores. After, dove, but not without showing its fluke. This meant we were not going to see her at least for 40 to 50 min, as she once again went foraging and hunting! What a nice goodbye.
Her goodbye was also our goodbye as it was time to start our way back to Ponta Delgada.

On our afternoon trip, the same sperm whales we saw in the morning made the day for everyone aboard, with particular emphasys to a very curious male calve, that breached right after showing us it’s tail, but was also seen spyhopping several times…probably checking us out.
Not long after that, a much larger female joined us but unfortunatly not for too long, since it was feeding time the only thing left for us to do was ti sit and admire her majestic fluke at the surface!