Song of the Whale Diary: 4th - 6th July

Friday 4th July
Written by Bridget
With our replenished crew we set off from Horta after spending the morning getting last minute shopping and some of us attend a talk on the work we our doing this year in the Canaries and the Azores. The presentation is given by Patricia (from the La Laguna University team in Tenerife) and Jonathan from the Sea Mammal Research Unit (St Andrews, UK) and held at the Department of Oceanography and Fisheries, University of Azores, which is based in Horta town. Our short passage to Lajes on Pico island is really nice as we have enough wind to sail and we are joined for some of the journey by a large group of bottlenose dolphins. In the evening myself and Nienke take a short trip ashore and join the shore team for an open air concert of ‘Fado’ -   traditional Portuguese music.

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Saturday 5th July
Written by Bridget
Some of us get up at 6am to get the boat ready to go out. It’s a beautiful morning and the mountain of Pico is for once clear of clouds, showing its cone- shaped peak. We head off west of Lajes and spend a quiet morning motoring up and down the coast. In the afternoon we are able to improve our acoustic effort by changing our hydrophone array from a 200m oil-filled 2 element to a new 400m potted 4 element array, which we hope is going to provide us with far greater sensitivity in detecting beaked whales. The initial signs are very good and we immediately hear sperm whales and dolphins very clearly on the headphones. Unfortunately, we discover that one of the front elements is not working, so the 4 element array then becomes a 3 element array! Evening brings a most amazing sight. A sperm whale breaching clear out of the water. Not a usual occurrence!!

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Sunday 6th July
Written by Nienke
Today is a day full of beaked whales! We start the day with a totally flat sea except for a little swell. An early sighting of Northern bottlenose whales keep us busy for the entire morning. This is the first time we have seen Northern Bottlenose whales from the new Song of the Whale and we are very excited! First we stay relatively close to the group to take ID-pictures. Afterwards we try to stay within 1 km of the group to try to collect acoustic data, a hard job with animals which are also being watched by whale watching boats and pop up in different places all the time. But we have our best people guessing were they will come up next time which is a great help. During the day other beaked whale groups are spotted both by the land team and by us, and we managed to take pictures of a mother-calf pair from the Zodiac. However, so far, it looks like we have not yet got any acoustic samples of them.  During the night we remain motoring south of Pico. Near the entrance of the channel between the islands of Pico and San Jorge, the sea is teeming with life; lots of dolphins and sperm whales are picked up by the hydrophone. Some dolphins were ‘seen by eye’ because of the green bioluminescence they set in motion.