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You can see the dolphins during winter, but the likelihood of waves makes a long day at sea less practical. The upside of visiting during winter, however, is that it sees the arrival of great hammerhead sharks( from November through February) which you can see at organised feeds.
If you’ re on a liveaboard out of West Palm Beach in Florida, it is sometimes possible( in calm conditions) to drift in the Gulf Stream at night and snorkel over deep water.
In the blackness, bottlenose dolphins have developed a strategy for herding flying fish into liveaboard hulls. You hear these little thumps in the darkness, then grey shapes appear in the water. Having stunned their prey, the dolphins move systematically around the boat, picking off their dinner at will. It’ s a great opportunity to witness natural behaviour and to photograph the dolphins with night-time reflections.
If I were to arrange a dedicated dolphin trip with no emphasis on diving or other experiences, I would choose the Bahamas. Dolphin opportunities abound on the eastern side of the Atlantic, but it’ s more a case of getting lucky. There’ s no such thing as dolphins on tap! The rich blue water of the Azores is a magnet for cetaceans,
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A bottlenose dolphin hunts flying fish by night in the Gulf Stream
including sperm and humpback whales. The signature species is the common dolphin, recognizable from the‘ hourglass’ pattern on its flanks. They enjoy riding the bow waves of RIBs and Zodiacs.
Norwegians would
We need to talk about orcas, the biggest members of the dolphin family. Despite the familial link, they’ re quite happy to prey on other cetaceans. For reasons unknown, orcas do not harm humans in the wild, though there have been fatal incidents involving captive orcas in aquaria.
Perhaps understandably, there’ s a limited appetite for swimming with orcas. Swimmers
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encounter them off New Zealand and Mexico’ s Pacific coast, where they have been observed hunting schools of mobula rays. We have a resident, if diminished, pod in west Scotland and there are seasonal visitors from Iceland and Norway, who visit Orkney and Shetland to practise hunting grey seals.
To enter the water in the company of orcas is to court the unknown. I did it once in South Africa, and barely had time to register the terrifying speed and power of the pod’ s outriders as they barrelled past me at 30mph. If there’ s one place where the situation approaches predictability, it’ s the fjords of northern Norway. Here, they hunt herring from late October to mid-January,
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PHOTO: SIMON ROGERSON |