Where else, in a day, can I (literally) walk my ass off while speaking German, Spansh and English, at times all in the same sentence?

Where else can I hear Russian, German, English, Dutch, French and my own bren Spanish in the course of a day? It´s remarkable.

I am taking heaps of pictures, but sadly usually only get about 20 mins at a time for internet (free at a lot of the albergues) so pics will come at the end of the jurney I´m afraid.

Wish me a Buen Camino–I´m off to soak my feet.

Here is the Lexy, sailed by a fellow named Steve that I became friendly with. He was giving a ride to another Frenchman needing a lift back to France, but they were stuck here in Horta waiting out some bad weather. This made me quite happy to have some friends in town and I often went by Steve’s boat to chat and drink wine on the deck of the Lexy. She’s a beauty:

Beautiful Lexy

And here’s Steve doing his wharf painting (which happens to be about 20 meters from the Biosphere one, and we were painting them on the same day.)

And there’s more posh boats:
(I didn;t get any private tours of these–MOST disappointing!)

Slot three participants proved to be a terrific team in the last two days. Despite the rough seas and strong winds on theAtlantic, and an ever-bouncing Physeter, we recorded data and captured ID pictures on several loggerhead turtles, fin and blue whales. It was quite gratifying to see team members helping each other, particularly when Friday’s photographer Olga began bounding around the front deck and Yvonne helped by holding her in place on the railing during the animal encounters.

Thursday we were treated to two schools of striped dolphins North of Faial, and numerous sperm whale sightings. Again we were treated to calves suckling on the female whales. Friday brought us two large blue whales swimming together, and then the unusual (yet not unheard of) experience of a fin whale and blue whale swimming together. And to complete the blue whale experience for slot 3, we were able to make quality ID pictures on a blue whale swimming with an adolescent, most likely a calf from last year.

Sightings for team 3: sperm whale – 27 encounters, 55 animals | minke whale – 1 encounters, 1 animal | blue whale – 4 encounters, 6 animals | fin whale – 1 encounter, 1 animal | common dolphin – 10 encounters, 158 animals | bottlenose dolphin – 1 encounters, 4 animals | Risso’s dolphin – 5 encounters, 25 animals | striped dolphins – 2 encounters, 55 animals.

Thanks to all the team members who made this research possible by donating their time, energy and money to this very worthy alternative to sitting on a beach with a book for their holiday.

Thanks to all our volunteers, we were able to make several sperm whale matches to whales seen here in theAzoresin previous years. Slot one identified a whale also seen here in 2010. In Slot 2 we matched two: one to a whale seen in 2004 and another in 2010.  Slot 3 matched whales to 2005, 2007 and 2008.

We also were able to match two 2 blue whales – Slot 1 matched a whale to 2006 and Slot 2 matched one to 2010. We don’t have any information yet on info on the blue whale matches from slot 3 because the registrar is currently out of the lab.

Lisa also sent off the Rissos dolphins photos, and from Slot 3 the mother and calf from the north are recognized animals. And another group of 4 known animals and had been seen further down the coast of Pico the day before.

Thanks as well to Lisa and our skipper Nuno for helping us take part in this important research. They are some of the best cetaceans spotters in theNorth Atlanticand their expertise led us to seeing more animals than anyone else in the harbor—including other research vessels!

Slot Three group photo

Fin Whale (swimming alongside a blue whale!)

(In case you missed the first set of wharf paintings, here they are: http://motoadventuregal.com/blog/2012/05/a-walk-on-the-wharf-1/ and http://motoadventuregal.com/blog/2012/05/a-walk-on-the-wharf-2/‎)

Blue whales are the largest mammals in the world, and an amazing sight to see! The whale went on and on forever–over 30 meters! (Almost 100 feet for us non-metric folks). After all the problems with bad weather and poor visibility for this last group, we got the day of a lifetime yesterday when we got to see THREE blue whales. Usually solitary swimmers, two were swimming together in towards shore, and one further out. Luckily, we got good ID pictures for all three.

ENJOY!

It this link does not come through in your email, you can click over to YouTube and see the video here: http://youtu.be/qYVxys4oTiQ

The weather remains challenging as is the visibility and wind, and the team members have had to remain flexible. We had an unusual – and sad – sighting on Sunday when we saw a dead common dolphin. It was missing its tail, and we assume it got caught in a fishing net even though the tuna fisherman here in the Azores use hooks and not nets. Monday was the best day on the water for this slot so far – we saw Risso’s dolphins breaching, a giant sun fish, a loggerhead turtle, and a group of fourteen sperm whales with calves!

(start Alisa’s blog commentary and pics–I did not show the dead dolphin to the Biosphere readers)

Dead Dolphin (Common) - Missing Tail

And here is something cool…sometimes there is a ship anchored outside the harbor. I’m told it’s a tuna buying ship–they pay better prices than on ths island, so tuna boats sail directly up to them and sell their fish.

Tuna-buying boat anchored outside Horta Harbor

And pretty cool, yesterday, the story was confirmed when I saw the tuna boat moored with them.