Song of the Whale Diary: 8th - 10th June

Sunday 8th June
Monday 9th June
Tuesday 10th June


Sunday 8th June
Written by Tim
With the Trade winds on our beam we have a great sail today with little trimming necessary and with the boat comfortably heeled over at a fairly constant angle. We make good progress towards the group of seamounts to the south of the Azores where we will carry out a series of survey transects to look at cetacean use of these important but poorly studied habitats before proceeding on to the Azores. In the Azores we will meet up with colleagues from the Sea Mammal Research Unit (St, Andrew’s University, UK) to continue our research on detecting beaked whales using acoustics. With no engine running we can hear clearly on both our towed hydrophones – unfortunately there is not much about to hear - only occasional distant dolphins and sperm whales and our only sightings for the day are a handful of loggerhead turtles. I spend my off-watch time designing a survey block and tracks to cover the Irving Seamount and adjoining Cruiser Tablemount. The survey block encloses these bathymetric features which are comprised of a group of extinct submarine volcanoes rising up from the abyssal plain (5 km deep) to within a few hundred metres of the surface – similar in origin to the Azores and Canarias. Seamounts are poorly understood habitats due to their remoteness but research suggests that these are productive areas due to upwelling currents that support higher densities of predators like turtles, sharks and cetaceans. The steep slopes and bottom depth may be particularly well suited to beaked whales – the focus of our work for this year.

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Monday 9th June
Written by Natacha
After the high seas of the first days the good weather makes now for a sea full of peace and beauty, and some life! A rare sighting of a dwarf sperm whale (Kogia simus) is the first of the day. It is logging very close to the Song of the Whale, but it then does it’s usual trick of disappearing underwater, without a splash, as we slow the boat to get photo ID, so unfortunately no pictures. Thanks to the turn in course for that sighting, Tim sees a small loggerhead turtle, condemned to a slow death by entanglement in a lost piece of net. Well, the turtle has a lot to thank the Kogia for because Claire steers SOTW skilfully towards the young turtle and Magnus gets it up to the deck. The entanglement seems recent and the turtle can be safely released and returned to sea…hopefully learning that nets are not good places to search for food!  The visual survey day closes with some friendly spotted dolphins. Apart from reptiles and cetaceans, birds are represented by a storm petrel and a lost dove, 400 nautical miles from any land, that rest for a while with us. Acoustically there are some surprises, one during the previous night, when we hear some possible trumpets mixed with sperm whale clicks. Trumpets are rarely produced  by sperm whales, with unknown function, maybe social. During the calm day we hear clearly the noise of a large vessel long before it appears on the horizon (some 8-9 m away). Shipping is the main cause of the fast increase in underwater noise in the oceans during the last decades. There are recent initiatives to optimize vessel construction and propulsion to make more silent and fuel efficient ships, like Song of the Whale. The acoustic monitoring, just before sunrise, tracks a close clicking sperm whale…...but this story belongs to tomorrow's diary!

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Tuesday 10th June
Written by Niklas
At the end of another amazing night with glowing stars, Natacha hears some sperm whales and tracks them. After a golden globe sunrise we change course for a photo identification just a half nautical mile off our course. With good teamwork this early morning we witness the fluking sperm whale from just a little more than one hundred meters behind. The black tail gives us a nice good-bye wink and we pass over the glassy mirror clear fluke print and only dream of what is down in the big blue! With our senses awake we track two more sperm whales and get photos of both. A short visit by three spotted dolphins guides us towards the Irving seamount, which we will get to tomorrow morning. We also see a dead squid floating and pluck it out of the sea. After a more or less glassy mirror day the wind starts to pick up from the south instead of north easterly. With peaceful hearts we enjoy the on-board made vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce.

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