06.06.2018 – Festival of the sea turtles

Everybody was counting! What a nice, collective action! Thank you dear guests for your attention and engagement! Today we followed the tracks of Loggerhead turtles. It was a real “Caretta caretta highway”. In total we counted 30 turtles and Filipe, our captain told me later, that he saw the first turtle directly in front of the harbor, so we can proudly anounce we had 31 turtles in one trip. Someone could almost believe there was a big gathering going on. If this was the festival of sea turtles their dreams (music) of the future is surely a plastic free ocean!

These wonderful beings, which travel through the enormous oceans for so many miles are famous for having jelly fish on their menu. As it happens we discovered besides turtles, as well a huge amount of tiny little Velellas (Velella velella), because of their appearance also called By the wind sailor. Is there a correlation? 😉

… did you know, that Loggerhead turtles:

– do one of the longest migrations in nature

– swim 24km/h

– are able to sleep for a few hours under water

… incredible super facts about these brave, far traveling reptiles, right?!

And another interesting fact: The Loggerhead’s sex is dictated by the temperature of the underground nest. By a temperature over 30 Grad Celsius it most likely to be a female and at a less temperature, a male.

Oh, I do not want to forget our Marine mammal sightings! We had two Tropical whales (Balaenoptera edeni), which approached the boat a few times and a school of 12-15 Bottlenose dolphins ( Tursiops truncatus) traveling at a leisurely pace.

By Fatima Kutzschbach

Sightings of the day

Ribeira Brava

17:00 Tropical whales, Bottlenose dolphins, 31 Loggerhead turtles