28.07.2024 – Wild and free

Honestly, when I got up this morning and opened my window, I thought that I might be soon going back to bed and spend the day watching a movie. Grey skies, slight rain, enough fog to impede the view onto the ocean. By the time I headed towards the office to start the briefings for our guests, the fog fortunately had lifted. When talking about the ideal whale-watching conditions, it is not only about the fog. We do not care much about sun or clouds – well, eventually for our pictures and the intensity of sunburns. It is all about visibility, wind and waves. Quickly checking the daily weather forecast – Oh dear, winds blowing from the west. Strong winds result in waves and whitecaps on the ocean surface. The whales and dolphins might still be in the area, but the whales’ blow will literally blow away and be overseen, just as the splashes of dolphin jumps look terribly similar to the whitecaps. Not to forget that our guests will have adventurous rides, eventually getting seasick or needing a yoga-session after a bumpy tour.

Thanks to our marvellously smart Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), which have learned to grab their share from the fish farms, we had an easy start to the day with an encounter just off the harbour of Calheta. All further tours headed eastwards, trying to escape the winds. In the afternoon, the Bottlenose dolphins had disappeared, and we had to make much longer voyages, luckily still managing to find groups of Atlantic spotted dolphins (Stenella frontalis). We do see these two species almost every day around Madeira, and their behaviour couldn’t be more different from each other. I find it an amazing example of how distorted our perception of dolphins is. Bottlenose dolphins are the most common species kept in captivity – remember Flipper? Once held in terribly small tanks, they will get trained to perform acrobatic jumps to get food. Most of these poor creatures are not able to communicate with their conspecifics, feed on their own or even move as they should. Seeing bottlenose dolphins in nature, you will observe them mostly swimming very calmly alongside the boats, very rarely being acrobatic. Swimming slow and often orientating at the coastlines, they are unfortunately an easy target to get captured. Our Spotted dolphins instead, are lucky enough to prefer open ocean habitats, thus are much less likely to get captured. If you were lucky enough to see these beautiful small dolphins on one of our trips, you might have seen them performing incredibly high leaps out of the blue, certainly approaching the boat very curiously. However the animals behave during your tour on the open ocean, they are certainly wild and free, as they should be!

If you wish to know more about dolphins kept in captivity, I can very much recommend to watch these two documentaries – “Blackfish” (directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, 2013) and “The Cove” (directed by Louie Psihoyos, 2009) – be aware that the images will be very graphic, sad and unfortunately, true.

By Sarah Kather

Sightings of the day

Ribeira Brava

09:30  Bottlenose dolphins

13:30 Atlantic spotted dolphins

Stenella

09:30 Bottlenose dolphins

14:00 Atlantic spotted dolphins

17:00 Atlantic spotted dolphins