On Monday we got to go out on our first dedicated survey. We left the harbour at 9:00am and the trip lasted till 4:30pm. On the dedicated survey we are basically looking for dolphins so that we can photo-id them. We are the only group in the area that has a photo-id license, which allows us to get as close to them as we want(obviously not in a reckless way). The photo at the header of my blog was taken by Kat on the first encounter of the trip. Right outside the harbour we caught up with 3 dolphins, and the water was like glass. I was taking effort at the time so I didn't grab my camera but it was nice to soak in the moment. My first good look at a bottlenose dolphin. You could see them swimming under the water which is always my favorite thing to watch, seeing them in their element. After we got enough id photos of them we moved on and quickly ran into a new set of dolphins. These ones were having a blast pulling out all the acrobatics. We found a third group a little bit later. These ones didn't splash around as much, but there were 14 of them so we were pretty much surrounded, and they had a claf with them. The calves are about half the size of the adults, so 2m(6 feet) long, and a lighter gray colour.
I was a little shutter happy, and ended up taking over 800 photos, for both photo-id and personal uses. I winowed it down to just 115, but I can't put them all up so these are my best ones!
You can recognize the calf in this picture by it's lighter colouring.
This dolphin is porpoising, also known as swimming really fast! It also has a very distinctive dorsal fin, making it easy to photo-id!
Calfs are not as graceful as the adults and always raise their heads out of the water when surfacing.
Nice action shots!!!
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