24.08.2025 – The end of a week

Today is Sunday, the last day of the week and this week was crazy. Not because we saw a lot of animals, more because of the contrary the lack of animals. This week we had several no sightings trip and today it almost seemed the same would happen for the Ribeira Brava trips.

On the first trip we had to travel more than 15km from the island, to see some Atlantic spotted dolphins (Stenella frontalis). That distance is almost one and a half hour of travelling for our old beauty, meanwhile the Stenella can be there in 20 minutes.

The second trip started promising. We left earlier, because our Spotter Silviano spotted some dolphins for us. They were swimming westwards and we tried to follow them, but in one point we simply had to give up. They were out of reach. Still Zé Maurice our skipper did not loose the hope. We turned around and headed to Madalena do Mar, were another group of Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) were spotted. It was again a long, but also hot trip. We endured this suffering and had a beautiful sighting off the animals.

By Horst Schulte

Sightings of the day

Ribeira Brava

09:00 Atlantic spotted dolphins

13:00 Bottlenose dolphins

Stenella

09:30 Atlantic spotted dolphins

13:30 Bottlenose dolphins

16:30 Bottlenose dolphins