azwhales
This morning, the sea filled us with an intense and contagious feeling of happiness and achievement!
Everyone onboard was searching for the dorsal fins of the dolphins that we knew to be close to us. The lookout managed to see them on the area but the high waves and the lack of sunlight (due to those misty clouds that characterize this island so well!) were making our lookout’s work even harder!
So, we started to navigate slowly, following the Cory’s shearwater movements, when suddenly a small group of common dolphins broke through one of the waves in our direction. Their marvelous energetic displays around our boat made everyone surrender to their splendor but unfortunately, we couldn’t stay with them for a long time as they were not welcoming us anymore.
So, we tried our hydrophone to search for more animals echolocating in the area and we could identify what it seemed to be a group of sperm whales. So, we navigated accordingly to the sound and after a while of giving the 360º angled view over our surroundings our skipper saw at distance the blow of one sperm whale! -Ahoy!
It was a marvelous sighting over an adult female with a calf by the side nursing on her as she was resting some more before going into the depths. After it dove and showed us the goodbye fluke, we went to see two more individuals that had just arrived at the surface.
Today the sea is still abundantly colonized by the Portuguese man-o-war colonies which make the delights of our beautiful loggerhead turtles!
azwhales
Equipa de Biólogos da Futurismo
Sandrina Rodrigues
