Angola Whale Watching
Wed, September 30, 2009 at 08:53PM ;)
from clube nautico, luandaI did whale watching tour for couple of times before but I never expected that the one I did recently in Angola would be the best one. When a friend asked me and my husband if we would like to come with her in a pre-arranged boat tour, I thought, "hmm why not, I don’t think there would be a whale at all, but at least we can see the sea and feel the fresh air". So we agreed to come.
We started the tour early morning at around 8.30am. The marina where we departed is located in the centre of Luanda city, it only takes 10minutes to get there from my place. So it was not a painful early morning wake up for a weekend despite the cloudy day. When we arrived in the boat there were already our 2 friends, one captain, bunch of sandwiches and bolos (sweet bread), and a coolbox full of drink. I took a bottle of water from the coolbox and swallowed my motion sickness pill. Although the sea looked calm, I know we are going to be in open sea of the Atlantic Ocean, so I did not want to take any risk.
And I was right. After 10 minutes riding to the west, the sea started to get quite choppy… and cold! *hehe, what a complainer I am, eh?* We kept riding for 40 minutes and I noticed the captain started to look from left to right occasionally, aparently this was the area where whales are sometime found. After sometime, one of us saw something and screamed, "Look!". It was a flying fish.. Still nice to see for me as it was my first time to see a fish can fly high, and long, and without any wing! How can they do that?
At one point, my husband saw a fin and screamed "look!". I was so excited, "Dolphins!!". The boat came closer to the fin, but it was a single fin, and not as playful as dolphins. When we reached at a very close distance with the fin, we realized it was a shark. A small one, but nevertheless, it was a shark. What is he doing on the surface? Was he hunting, or was he just playing and swimming around just for sport? After 10minutes, convinced that there would be any dramatic action from the shark that we can take a pic on, we left him behind and let him enjoying himself.
We kept riding, and again bumped into another shark. We stopped. A different one. Again, we waited for some time hoping that he would jump from inside the water to give us a nice show, but it did not happen and so we left him. And we continued riding to the west. And.. Again, another shark. Woohoo!! And 3 metres away from that shark, was another shark.. And again, another shark. We kept moving, we saw more fins patroling on the surface. Goshh, what is this, a shark-infected water?? Cool! :) We then canceled our plan to go swimming on the sea, haha. Everybody, stay on the boat!
After 1.5 hours going around with no sight of whales, we were sure that this is not our lucky day, but then 
the captain screamed, "Whale!". Everybody looked at the direction he was pointing. In almost 1km distance, we saw a shape that looked like a tail of a whale. Unfortunately, after 1 minute, the tail was still protruding from the sea, haha. If a whale dives into the deep sea, you would only see the tail for couple of seconds, so it had to be something else."Sorry, it is a boat", the captain said. After another 3 minutes we got closer to that thing, and to our surprise, that protruding something is indeed a tail of a whale!! It was protruding in the air for minutes and minutes. It is almost as if the whale was flagging us his location, and more, let us take a lot of pictures of his tail when we arrived. Not long after we finished with our last picture, the whale dove into the deep sea. We could not believe it, and even the captain who is used to seeing whales was confused, what a weird whale! :)
The captain stopped the machine and the boat was just floating for some time. Aparently there were two whales who playfully swam together around our boat. They dove and got up again to the surface, and dove again and got up again and one point they got up to the surface only around 10 metres distance from our boat. Wow, they are HUGE! There were no other boat around, no tourists whatsoever and the whales kept dancing around our boat, this is like a private show for us. Where in the world you'd get this? And did it not the whale itself that told us where they were? I was so happy! :)
After 30minutes being entertained by the lovely whales, we decided to say goodbye to them and returned to Luanda beach. And of course on our way back the sharks are still there, many of them, just like mosquitos in open air. We said thank you to the captain for the nice trip and the 2 whales, and he replied, "last week there were 15 of the same type." Oh, God bless Angola.
See more pics of this short trip at Gallery.
Reader Comments (3)
hi Lan, thanks! :) iyah gw jg seneng banget waktu liat, soalnya jarang2.. hehe.