Song of the Whale Diary: 25th - 27th September

Thursday 25th September
Friday 26th September
Saturday 27th September


Thursday 25th September
Written by Antonella
 
The setting up of the last details took a little bit longer than expected, and this gave us the time to have a Canarian coffee (“barraquito”) at the bar along the marina. We then leave the harbour of Las Galletas at 16.50, heading towards El Hierro which we plan to reach during the night around 3am. The sea conditions are almost perfect, much better than the last week in the same area. SW Tenerife’s water is the 'short-finned pilot whales sea'! We expect to see them quite soon….and we do. After less than 30 minutes we have the first sighting of the “roazes negros”, as the local fisherman still call them.  It is a spread-out group, with some well known dorsal fins. Later during the afternoon, we sight another group of pilot whales and the far away blow of an unidentified whale. The dark is already coming down, and we can already see close by the lights of Playa Santiago in La Gomera. After a delicious dinner prepared by Mat, we get ready for the night shifts. The sea is sparkling with fluorescent waters, and some dolphins, probably spotted dolphins, find us enough fun to join us for a little while for some fast bow riding. El Hierro is almost here.. 

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Friday 26th September

It gets light around 8 am, and as the sun comes up we start to motor slowly towards the west side of the island of El Hierro. We have spent the night drifting off the south coast and have had some beaked whale detections – here’s hoping we can see some animals this morning. The sea is flat calm – perfect. Our persistence is rewarded – around 10am we get another acoustic detection, and about half an hour later, see a group of around 7 Blainville’s beaked whales. They are travelling east. We see them maybe 8 times over the course of the next few hours. Around 1300 we have to leave them as we have things to set up in the marina that need to be done in the daylight, and Nienke and Jeppe have several things to prepare for the land station here, so reluctantly we head back towards La Restinga. Hopefully the whales will still be around tomorrow.

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Saturday 27th September
Written by Richard

Today is spent doing various odd jobs on the boat while alongside in La Restinga. Mat spends a sweaty hour or so in the engine room tweaking various bits and pieces of equipment while Nienke and Jeppe finalise the testing of the video equipment to be used at the shore station here. In the afternoon Patty (who was with us earlier in the season) comes down to the harbour to see us.  Sadly, she is not joining us on SOTW for this leg of the project, but El Hierro is her natural habitat where she lives and works for most of the year.  Patty has come to help with the logistics for the shore based contingent of our team, something she did with remarkable speed given that it is late on a Saturday afternoon. We have now also been joined by Richard Black and Jonathan Galliver from BBC Online.  Richard, BBC Online Environment correspondent, is due to file a number of radio and web pieces from SOTW over the next week. Jonathan will be complimenting this with ‘video on demand segments’. Both journalists immediately get down to work and are soon ready to file their first reports via satellite link back to London (If you want to see what they have written and filed whilst on Song of the Whale, go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7641537.stm ). After dinner we leave La Restinga for sea, the plan being to spend the night drifting to the South of El Hierro in the hope of locating beaked whales acoustically.  It is a perfect night with clear skies and not a breath of wind.

Photo Captions:
Blainvilles beaked: A Blainville's beaked whale (taken under a research permit issued by the Government of the Canary Islands). The large scar on the left side of the animal will make this individual instantly recognisable using photo identification.

Olly and Richard Black: Olly explains the intricate workings of some of our specialised software to Richard Black from the BBC.

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