We were back on the top deck for first light on our second day at sea on the ORCA Saga Caribbean Calypso. The Spirit of Discovery was about two hundred & fifty miles West of La Coruna on the North West corner of Spain. We were getting into the swing of the surveying and life at sea. It was good to find the ship was comfortable and stable at sea. We managed to get two or three half hour survey rotations in before heading down for breakfast. The only problem so far had been the absence of any Cetaceans on the first day at sea as we passed well to the West of the Bay of Biscay. But the deep oceans have a smaller number of Cetacean species compared to the continental shelf and unless you are on a Whale migration route, there can be long spells when you don't encounter any Cetaceans. After breakfast, we returned to the deck again. Being further South, it wasn't as cold as it had been on deck for the first day.
Around late-morning, I was surveying from the starboard side & chatting to Chris, who was another of our regular top deck passengers. Chris & I saw a distant splash several miles ahead of us & to the starboard side. We scanned the area for the next five minutes, but we didn't see it again or any blows. There wasn't anything we could do with the sighting and being a lone splash, I couldn't be sure if we had seen the splash of a Whale or a lone Tuna: I wrote it off as probably the latter option.
When I had lost all hope on the splash reoccurring, there was a shout from one of our regular passengers, Penny, of a Cetacean breaching on the port side about half a mile in front of the ship. I got onto it quickly. It looked too big to be a Dolphin and looked like a slim Beaked Whale. Beaked Whales are some of the most trickly Cetaceans to identify and good photos are often required to both identify the species and to convince others you have made the correct identification. I quickly lifted the camera and started to take photographs as it repeated breached, before it splashed down into the water. In total, I saw it beach five times, before it stopped. I lowered the camera to have another look with the bins, but I couldn't find it again.
I joined the others who were on the port side having had a quick look at the photos. These confirmed my suspicions that it was my first Sowerby's Beaked Whale. I've seen similar photos of Sowerby's Beaked Whales breaching like that in the Bay of Biscay. But as they are an uncommon species in the Bay of Biscay, it was a species I never expected to see.
This was the third & final set of breaches, I managed to photograph.
A couple of hours later, we were on our final thirty minute survey, before heading off to lunch, when we saw a pod of Dolphins. They were quickly identified as eight Striped Dolphins. It had been a good morning for sightings.
After a superb morning, the afternoon was quieter. However, by the end of the day, we had also seen brief views of another unidentified Beaked Whale, a pod of eleven Short-beaked Common Dolphins, another pod of six unidentified Dolphins and a lone Risso's Dolphin. The only Birds I saw during the day were two Kittiwakes & six Little Gulls.
