Sandrina RodriguesWhat a day today! We’re extremely happy because after quite many days we finally saw our beloved resident sperm whale male – Mr. Liable! We didn’t just saw him… it breached right next to one of the zodiacs!!!
But let’s start from the beginning. We started our catamaran trip with a pod of feeding common dolphins together with Cory’s shearwaters, but our lookouts informed us about a male sperm whale waiting for us so we didn’t stop for long.
When we arrived to the whale, after some time of observing it calmly breathing in the surface, we saw its huge tail which we instantly recognized! It was Mr. Liable, our good friend which is already known in the Azores for around 20 years!
Everybody was cheering with excitement when they saw this spectacular animal lifting its tail before a deep dive to search for squid. The zodiac boat was even luckier – Mr. Liable jumped out of the water right next to it!!! This particular sperm whale has been known to us for such a long time but we have never seen it breach from a boat – how lucky we were today!
After saying goodbye to the whale, we got back to the common dolphin pod, which was even bigger now – there were plenty of dolphins with babies, and all of them together with hundreds of Cory’s shearwaters were on a real feeding frenzy! We saw many jumps, and right before we started heading back some of the dolphins formed a line right in front of our boat and started traveling really fast all together – that was a truly impressive sight!
As if it wasn’t enough, after that we also saw a loggerhead turtle! It was gently swimming in front of our boat, sticking out its head once in a while to breathe in some air.
The waves didn’t manage to ruin our trips and we had some incredible sightings (even a one of a kind Mr. Liable’s breach!)
Futurismo Biologists Team
Sandrina Rodrigues
