A sensation and other good news !

A sensational Chinese white dolphin in our bay !

Last weekend the beach was flooded with people and the sea full of jetskis and motorboats. There were no dolphins to be seen. I talked to my good friend Hamid who told me about the days 20 years ago when he would camp at the very beach we were standing at, before any buildings had gone up,  and how the sea was bustling with life. The coral reef was blooming and full of big fish.
Not even a generation later the coral reef is badly damaged, 70% of it is white skeletons and hardly any small fish can be seen, forget about big ones. How quickly this paradise is lost ! Who knows how much longer we will have dolphins in our bay ? At the pace we are going I´m afaid it will only be a few years before thy disappear as well... if there was any way of protecting the little that remains !

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This weekend started slow. No dolphins yesterday.
And today then they finally reappeared.

The water was flat like a mirror and it was easy to see them hundreds of meters away. I gave the dolphin signal and my daughter Charlotte and I swung onto the kayak.

They swam slowly towards us, we could already make out the baby dolphins with their mothers, when the dreaded warning splash with a tail fin was given. Oh, hell, we were considered a risk. Who knows, the group had propably negative contact with humans and jetskies during the past weekend and now they were more prudent. We respect this and paddle smoothly parallel to the pod, at first just watching.

Charlotte watching the dolphins arrive

And there I saw the small dolphin from two weeks ago, the one that had got stuck in the fishing net. And the net was gone ! There was a greenish grayish scar tissue on the tail and dorsal fin. He looked fine - he survived the torment !! Great news !!

This is how it looks when the dolphin is right beside you

Circling around and around

Same dolphin

Visibility in the water was low today (Charotte´s pictures)

The group passing by

This shot has been taken from outside the water

Young dolphins come up for breath quite often

Charlotte in the background following a dolphin

When we met the group in the water they swam on swiftly. Again, as is their behavior pattern, some adults will come to distract you, while the mothers with their young ones swim into safety. Charlotte took some pictures from right inside the group. This time the one to distract us was swimming around in circles and at one time made a phantastic jump right over me. I felt like in free Willy when the wale jumped out of the basis. I had stretched out my hand and he was just within reach. Wow ! He then left to rejoin his group.

Geting real close

We followed the dolphins for another 400m down the coast.
Another great dolphin weekend. Now the week can begin !

The loner - an amazing sight !

I was already packing up when Charlotte gave another dolphin alert.
Quickly we sped into the kayak and out into the open. There he was... one dolphin all by himself !
We tried to meet up with him a couple of times but every time we went right he went left, when we went quick he went slow until we could observe him from close up. This dolphin was not like our normal bottlenose dolphins. This one looked very different !

First of all, his dorsal fin seemed malformed, like if the first bit had been halfed and the upper half had been moved backward. He also swam differently, slower and with a stronger arc, as if he dived straight down again.

The mouth is much longer  and there is no hump on the nose

Here the distinct dorsal fin is visible

I jumped in and we circled twice around each other. Wow, his nose looked very different and his eye was in a different place. What is this, I thought ?
I took some pictures and hoped that I did not miss.

Back home the pictures were downloaded from our mask. And my impression was confirmed. This was most certainly not a bottlenose dolphin. But what other dolphin can this be ? A common ? No ! We started a web search and came across the Amazonas river dolphin, but that is a sweet water dolphin !

Then finally Charlotte found a lead:
http://www.cms.int/reports/small_cetaceans/data/S_chinensis/s_chinensis.htm

 
What we witnessed is one af very few Chinese white dolphins (Sousa chinensis) ! Their population is shrinking fast and they are counted by the hundreds only !

We had become rare witness to one of the species that is on the verge of extinction - An almost religious feeling of awe !