Today’s original plan had us going on our whale watching tour & then out to some caves in the middle of the island. But, with renting a car tomorrow, we’ve decided it makes more sense to push the caves to tomorrow so now - just the whale watching! We headed down to the harbour right after breakfast and after some waiting, we were heading out onto the water with our guide.
The Azores is a hotspot for a lot of whale and dolphin species. Some stay all year, some migrate through, some are on human-watching tours (I made that last one up) and the protection of the animals is something taken quite seriously. One of the key things they do is have a spotter up on the top of Monte Brasil, which we climbed yesterday. The spotter keeps an eye on the water and radios to the boats when something is seen. That keeps the boats from getting too close and scaring the animals.
Luckily, today was a much better day to be out on the water than yesterday. The sky was much clearer and it was warmer. We didn’t get a chance to see any whales but we saw a sunfish, a leatherhead turtle, common dolphins and flatnose dolphins. The flatnose dolphins get white as they age and apparently, like to fight each other as they also get a lot of scars. The common dolphins were quite playful, jumping out of the water quite a bit. The flatnose dolphins were a smaller pod, I think maybe four but there were many more of the common dolphins, maybe closer to 12 or 15? It was really quite enjoyable to watch them jumping around and they actually came quite close to the boat, which surprised me.
Once we were back on land, we got a bite of lunch at the other cafe at the harbour, this one a bit larger. And we found out that not only is it Sunday (we already knew that part) but it was also Mother’s Day and Labour Day. So nothing was going to be open, restaurant-wise. This place opened up because it had a big group coming. Hmmm. That’s okay, we figured out a plan of stopping at the grocery store (the only thing that would be open today) on the way back to the hotel to pick up some meat & cheese & bread to have a little hotel room picnic, which ended up working out nicely. Before heading back to the hotel, we took a little self-guided walking tour around town. We probably should have done that on our first afternoon because we had seen pretty much everything by that point, but it was a nice opportunity to see my favourite blue church again.
Then, it was some nice downtime once we made it back to the hotel, enjoying our little picnic and settling in for the night. Tomorrow is our last full day - we’re renting a car and driving around the island. I’m looking forward to it!
