Martin Northey’s Blog

One of our many escorts

I see Dolphins often at sea, in fact on two occasions in the last two months I have been asked by clients to find Dolphins, on both occasions I was successful - much to my relief!  I may of course have found Porpoises, because sadly I don’t know the difference, I have just gone on line to find out more about them, looked at photographs of each and am still none the wiser. What I have learnt however is that there are 6 different Porpoise species and almost 40 different species of Dolphin, looking at pictures on line and comparing them with the ones on this page served only to confuse me more.

Surfacing alongside us at speed

From October 13th to 16th I went on a four day cruise to Morocco and Spain in a Sunseeker Manhattan 52. Having checked the weather forecast which gave us near perfect conditions for our cruise, we left Vilamoura on Monday at about 9 am heading for Gibraltar, we had filled up with diesel the day before and also had telephoned the two marinas to try and book a berth. Queensway Quay told us that their marina was closed because of damage to the marina in a storm two days before and Marina Bay asked us to telephone when we were about an hour away.  About half way to Trafalgar we passed some Dolphins and I have to confess that I missed them because I was sleeping at the time.

Two dolphins swimming alonside us

Soon after passing Cape Trafalgar we telephoned Marina Bay Marina and were told that they were closed because an oil tanker had gone aground on Europa Point, split in half and lost a large quantity of oil. We decided to stay well away from Gibraltar to avoid getting oil all down our waterline and as soon as we were past the traffic separation scheme we altered course to pass east of Ceuta and then go on down to Marina Smir on the Meditteranean coast of Morocco.  Arriving late in the afternoon at Smir, we checked in and soon after went out to dinner in a restaurant in the marina. The next morning my two companions went by taxi to Tetuan to see round the town which they enjoyed and arrived back at the boat at about 4 pm carrying a carpet each! When I heard the price that they had paid which was extremely reasonable I wished that I had gone with them. 

They had gone right under the boat and appeared on our port bow

We left Marina Smir at 5 pm with 50 nautical miles to go to Puerto Banus our next port of call. We had arranged to have dinner at 8 pm at a restaurant in Banus and so went rather faster than we had the day before, arriving at our destination in less than two hours. Only slowing down when about 10 miles south of Banus when we were surrounded by hundreds of Dolphins. 

We left Banus at about 1 pm the next day having filled up with fuel, the fuel guage was showing 1/4 of a tank left, which was really not too bad after a total distance of 220 nautical miles.  Our next port of call was going to be Cadiz so we set off towards Europa Point and in almost the same position that we had encountered Dolphins the day before we found them again, but this time not 100s but 1000s!  More than I had ever seen before, the day before I had not taken any photographs but this time I did. They were clearly feeding but not so hungry that they didn’t want give us a show by swimming alongside, under and in front of us and often leaping out of the water. 

At one point we saw something that I had only seen before on National Geographic TV, the Dolphins were swimming and leaping out of the water in a circle and in the middle of that circle the fish were contained in a tight cylindrical shape from about a metre blow the surface to a depth of about four metres, we unintentially motored within about four meters of this tightly packed column of fish and could see the Dolphins were taking it in turns to swim at speed into the fish catching them in their mouths as they swam through. Sadly the photograph that I took of this amazing spectacle did not show the fish because of the reflection on the completely calm water.

Tanker aground and split into two parts on Europa Point

After probably an hour of motoring slowly and taking photographs we carried to Europa Point where I took the photograph to the left of the tanker aground on Europe point that we had heard about the day before.  I have since heard that the ship was ‘in ballast’ at the time of colliding with Europa Point and the oil lost was its own fuel oil

After a fast and uneventful passage down the Strait of Gibraltar and up to Cadiz and no more Dolphins we arrived at Puerto Sherry at about 7 pm after travelling 102 nautical miles from Puerto Banus. We had hoped to go into Puerto Americas but were told on the telephone that they did not have a berth large enough for us, so we went on to Puerto Sherry where we there were several berths large enough.  I had not been in Puerto Sherry for about 13 years and was surprised to find that the buildings surrounding the marina were still in the same unfinished state that they were last time I was there. 

An alongside acrobatic display

We left Puerto Sherry at about 9.30 am and with just 95 nautical miles to Vilamoura we expected to arrive at about 1.30 (Portuguese time) but when about 15 miles south east of Cabo St Maria, we came across another enormous group of Dolphins and probably spent an hour and a half cruising with them and taking photographs.  We arrived back at Vilamoura at 3.30 pm, the fuel tank guage was again showing around 1/4 so we filled up with diesel while we checked in at the marina reception.

Reflecting on the last four days, the boat had performed faultlessly, the weather had been perfect, we had visited interesting places, spent time with interesting and amusing people and had seen Dolphins everyday - it was a really enjoyable cruise.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 10:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.