Three cetacean species, birds, fish, reptiles and invertebrates

What a day! Today the wind calmed down even more so we had perfect conditions and perfect timing. Over the calm sea surface every minor elevation was visible.

So we were detecting plenty of Portuguese man-of-war the whole length of the tour.

Afterwards we were observing common dolphins close by and all around. They let us get marvelled by their colourful appearance.

Later we noticed a lot of splashes and the activity went on when we approached. We were lucky to be able to identify the bluefin tuna while some of them left the water for a short period of time. The feeding frenzy stopped shortly after but some friendly clients managed to film it and offered us the footage to keep this beautiful memory alive.

We went from one highlight to the next. We came closer to a sperm whale calf, obviously by following the regulation keeping the recommended distance. After watching it travel for a while it suddenly fluked, which is not that common in the young ones.

Then we turned around were more sperm whales where blowing in the distance. Before arriving there other individuals emerged closer so we stopped there. When this two fluked we were prepared to take pictures of the unique fingerprint like tails, that’s how we managed to identify Bagel and Dilys from the green group. They synchronised their hyperventilation and showed their distinct flukes shortly after each other, which helped us to get both.

Turning our heads, we had the forth fluke a bit further away on the left but due to the angle it was not ideal to recognise this one. Another calf appeared more to the front with another probably sub adult and more where to be seen in the area further away.

We already were about to leave this abundant sperm whale zone when our attention was caught by a juvenile loggerhead turtle which allowed us to see it well.

Then we finally left all this biodiversity behind to meet even more. In front of the lookout a bigger group of bottlenose dolphins was greeting us warm heartedly losing no time with its approach. They presented us their group members hanging out surrounding us. The pod was composed of several calves, like the sperm whales before and one light grey bottlenose dolphin was indeed very young still being marked with birth stripes which usually disappear at about six weeks of age. It was beautiful to enjoy the presence of all this new generations which will hopefully be around for a few more decades.

Among them we spotted even some curiosities as some dolphins had some deformations, one on the beak and the other one on the peduncle which is the part between dorsal fin and tail. This two individuals looked new to us and will be added to our photo-id catalogue of the bottlenose rarities.