Beaked whales, false killer whales, sperm whales and dolphins in one day in Pico!

Our day started with a swimming with dolphin tour. Our spotter saw a group of common dolphins, so we headed there. It was a pretty big group travelling quite fast, so it was a bit difficult at the beginning to put swimmers in the water to see them because the dolphins were not very interested.

Finally, we saw the formation of a small school of mackerel, where the dolphins and cory’s shearwater were having a feast! It was there when our guest could better see these animals and even saw a dolphin calve lactating from its mother, not bad to start the day!

After this, we had some time left, and we decided to go watch a sperm whale group that was close to us before going back to the harbour.

In the afternoon we had a regular whale watching tour, and what a tour! Just after leaving the harbour, we found a group of beaked whales, a difficult species to sight, but we could see that there were at least two calves with them.

After, we went to the encounter of sperm whales, we even used the hydrophone to locate them and be able to hear their echolocation, which was incredibly loud this time! Shortly after that, the sperm whales started to pop up the surface one after another, at one moment we were with 8 individuals at the same time at the surface.

Then, they started to go for deep foraging dives, and showed us their fluke in each of them. After, our spotter had an amazing surprise for us, we headed to where he told us and guess what?

A group of false killer whales was there for our joy! We stayed a while with them because it is not a typical species to sight. They were friendly and curious with us and came to bow ride our boat several times, it was as our lucky day! We had a gap of the false killer whales to show our guest another species, the bottlenose dolphin, which also came close to our boat.

Then, we returned to the group of false killer whales to enjoy them a little bit more. Our guests loved them too. Sadly, we had to leave the animals to come back to land, but we had one last surprise on the way back, a loggerhead turtle! What a nice afternoon for whale watching!