365 Project, Day 145
Here is my day 145 submission to my 365Project:
It's our last day at sea today...production is done and we're just waiting the final recovery of the OBNs (ocean bottom nodes) and for our ship to bunker and take on provisions. I have to admit I wasn't searching for marine mammals today (although I wanted to!) as I was busy doing our end-of-project paperwork of which I wanted to have mostly completed by the time we got to port this afternoon.
Despite my slacking off in the spotting department ;) we still had a sighting today...thanks to our keen bridge crew. One of the crew called my cabin to ask me if I wanted to see some whales. I thought he was joking for a moment but then he said that there were indeed some animals approaching us off our bow. So, I immediately ran to the bridge and headed out on deck with my camera...and we saw a group of unidentified (but probably bottlenose, Tursiops truncatus) dolphins with some short-finned pilot whales (Globicephala macrorhynchus). They didn't come very close, approaching within 2 km at their closest, but I watched them through my binos for about 45 minutes as they busily porpoised and leapt around; a fun sighting and a great way to end our time offshore Angola :)
Despite the distance to the sighting I still managed to get some photos...and here's the best cropped in shot I could get of a leaping dolphin:
Fun fact of the day:
Short-finned pilot whales are commonly observed in mixed species group and are often accompanied by dolphins, especially bottlenose dolphins. In mixed species groups the male pilot whales and dolphins tend to remain at the perimeter of the group.
Read more about short-finned pilot whales at this Society for Marine Mammalogy webpage.
Here are some more shots from this distant but fun sighting:
It's our last day at sea today...production is done and we're just waiting the final recovery of the OBNs (ocean bottom nodes) and for our ship to bunker and take on provisions. I have to admit I wasn't searching for marine mammals today (although I wanted to!) as I was busy doing our end-of-project paperwork of which I wanted to have mostly completed by the time we got to port this afternoon.
Despite my slacking off in the spotting department ;) we still had a sighting today...thanks to our keen bridge crew. One of the crew called my cabin to ask me if I wanted to see some whales. I thought he was joking for a moment but then he said that there were indeed some animals approaching us off our bow. So, I immediately ran to the bridge and headed out on deck with my camera...and we saw a group of unidentified (but probably bottlenose, Tursiops truncatus) dolphins with some short-finned pilot whales (Globicephala macrorhynchus). They didn't come very close, approaching within 2 km at their closest, but I watched them through my binos for about 45 minutes as they busily porpoised and leapt around; a fun sighting and a great way to end our time offshore Angola :)
Despite the distance to the sighting I still managed to get some photos...and here's the best cropped in shot I could get of a leaping dolphin:
Fun fact of the day:
Short-finned pilot whales are commonly observed in mixed species group and are often accompanied by dolphins, especially bottlenose dolphins. In mixed species groups the male pilot whales and dolphins tend to remain at the perimeter of the group.
Read more about short-finned pilot whales at this Society for Marine Mammalogy webpage.
Here are some more shots from this distant but fun sighting:
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| Dolphin fun! |
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| Female short-finned pilot whale |
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