You can never get bored of watching dolphins. What
is it about these beautiful and charismatic animals that we all love. In the
past 3 years I have been on many many dolphin cruises. I have been lucky
enough to see Spinner, Bottlenose and Risso's dolphins and short-fin Pilot
Whales. The Maldives is actually one of the top five places in the world to see
cetaceans. Out of the 80 species worldwide, 23 species have been recorded in
the Maldives. This includes the largest animal on the planet, the magnificent Blue
Whale which is known to migrate past. I have never seen one though!
The most common and abundant dolphins to see though
are the Spinner dolphins. These are the guys we generally see on the dolphin
cruise. I have seen them in there hundreds jumping and spinning out of the
water. It's a very cool sight. So as you can imagine I was pleasantly
surprised, well more like amazed, when on Thursday’s dolphin cruise we stumbled
upon a huge pod of not Spinner dolphins but Bottlenose dolphins. I have never
seen anything like it before, there must have been between 300 and 500 of
them. It's actually very hard to work out numbers of dolphins when there
are so many, you kind of have to guesstimate! We were surrounded, they were
jumping and swimming around the boat, playing at the front of the bow, it was
beautiful and such a rare sight. Normally whenever I have seen bottlenose
dolphins in the past, it has always been small family pods of about 5 to 20,
not over 300!!!!
It really was amazing to watch, to be surrounded by
these cute and happy faces. Bottlenose dolphins always look happy as their
small stubby beak gives them a smiley face. Who could resist that, even I couldn’t
stop smiling, no one could! I have never taken video of any dolphin
cruises before but as this was such a rare and beautiful sight I wanted to
capture it on film and share it with you. Unfortunately my camera battery died
but I managed to get a few minutes of footage. Please check out the video here
There is nothing like seeing dolphins in the wild that can't bring a smile to your face, even on a bad day! Enjoy.....
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