Hello everybody!
I’m here to tell you about my first meeting with cetaceans in the Ligurian waters.
On the 4th of September, I had my first experience on the whale watching boat “Corsara”. We left Oneglia harbour in the early afternoon. The weather and sea conditions were fairly good.
When the trip started, I sat in the middle of the boat among the tourists. I received a lot of questions during the trip, all about the types of cetaceans that we could see and their characteristics. In the first two hours, we only spotted a beautiful manta ray (Mobula mobular, the Mediterranean manta ray) for a few seconds. But I certainly did not expect that soon the day would become much more exciting! In fact, when we reached offshore waters, we spotted a large feeding spot of fish… And thereafter we made several interesting sightings!
Suddenly, after few meters from the feeding spot, we found a large pod of striped dolphins that seemed very intrigued by our boat.
But the most beautiful encounter was the following one: while we had striped dolphins all around us, the watchers on the sighting tower communicated they saw a blow! So, we moved in the direction of the animal and we found a large sperm whale! The marine biologist on board identified him: we were in front of a male named Franky, recognizable by the marks on its back. Franky showed us his tail when he started to dive.
In the final part of the trip I went up to the sighting tower, but we no longer saw anything. Despite that, I was super happy about my first meeting with cetaceans in the Ligurian waters!
