Dolphin Diaries Ponta do Ouro Mozambique

Check in with dolphins we did, but see we did not....

In true essence of a long weekend, dolphin sightings dropped substantially.

After some 6 hours at sea on friday, The Dolphins of Ponta were no-were to be seen. Our finned friends were out of the area, either finding sanctuary in Kosi Bay or Techobanine (both closed off areas that are sure to offer solace from the increased tourism activities brought on by the south african woman's day long weekend). Unbelievable good conditions with sea state that only got better as the day progressed found us searching, searching, searching - to no avail.

We were however awed by multiple humpback whale sightings offshore together with great whale acoustics as we eves dropped in on them. A mere two humpback dolphins were spotted by the dolphin swim boat Kira.

Saturday morning found us launching in poor sea state, again with no dolphins. This resulted in us canceling the launches for the rest of the day! We just could not go through another day of disappointed peeps knowing that the chances of seeing our finned friends were poor. One less boat on the water could only help.

Sundays morning launches found not too bad sea state and a pod of fast swimming dolphins passed through us when we were snorkeling up north, however they were moving very fast and we chose not to peruse them, for the love of Dolfriends! 

One cannot blame the dolphins for their fleeing and I remember a day in the last school holidays were I sat and observed the dolphin boats working, servicing the dolphin swim industry. The conditions were perfect and dolphins were aplenty spending the good part of the morning in the bay between socializing, resting and hunting. As I sat and watched with wonder I could not help but feel alarmingly guilty and responsible for not being able to do more to protect our finned friends. An inner voice kept on screaming at me 'it's too much, it's too much' as I watched three operators (including ourselves), together with a multitude of other vessels traversing back and forth within the dolphins range. The dollies have not spent this much time in the bay since then.

As luck would have it, my early morning tea on dolphins deck found me jumping with joy as I saw the dolphins return to the bay today Check out the pics. There they were, relaxed and socializing on back-line. Few boats had launched and there were NO jetski's around. Murphy's law - we did not have enough peeps to go to sea today! All good though as it's great to give the dolphins a day off!