Captain and Guest Blog – I'm pretty sure a dolphin tried to talk to me using his blowhole – Socorro March 29th

I’m pretty sure a bottlenose dolphin tried to talk to me today, using his blowhole.  I was in one of our tenders tied up at the divesite, waiting for the divers to come back. There were dolphins all around the divesite, coming up for a breath and then diving down to play with the divers. One time a dolphin came up right next to me in the boat, but when he expelled the gas through his blowhole he turned sideways a little so that his blowhole was partly submerged in the water, pointing it in my direction, and blowing out hard three times in succession, each time making a loud trumpet-like sound at me.  I’ve never seen a dolphin display this behaviour before and I’m quite sure it was some attempt at communication. The way he tilted his body sideways so that the blowhole was submerged just enough to create the trumpet-like noise was quite deliberate. Anyway, I did my best trumpet imitation back at him and he immediately descended back into the divers bubbles. I guess he didn’t like what I had to say.
Captain Gordon

Photo by Jeroen Elout

What a beautiful day, I do not know what to name first, started off with giant Mantas again, you start to look up and go oh, o.k. Manta again where are the dolphins and the whales ? Guess we are getting spoiled … Had a couple of big hammerheads but really shy. Some silver tips a little bit more curios a lot of small stuff again if you watch out for it like a big group of spotted puffer fish eating up the rest of a giant lobster head.

But definitely to personal highlights of our “diving life” was a group of six dolphins playing with us through out the whole dive. I realized  there are some a little bit shy always sticking to a more curious one, some were imitating our bubbles and some needed a little bit entertainment to stick to us otherwise they went of thinking probably boring divers-we play somewhere else…but maybe we are just interpreting a lot of human feelings into this always smiling face. I definitely felt touched by looking in their eyes.

Photo by Christine Hagen

Finally we went whale watching with the zodiac and while snorkelling we had twice a mother and calf in the water with us although we had to be a little bit sportive to get to them it was a moment we will never forget and on video or camera the best picture is in our head of a comparably small calf swimming besides its huge mother moving silently beside us and then with a wave of their fluke disappearing into the depth of the ocean again-leaving us behind-startled-full of emotions and overwhelmingly happy…
Annette and Birte from Germany: