Our guests this morning experienced an incredible array of visual delights as we enjoyed sightings of bow riding bottlenose and common dolphins, several fin whales and a couple of blue whales...all before lunch! We started with a marine mammal encounter that was not a sighting, but a sound. The squeaking and clicking communications of common dolphins could be heard through the hull of the ship by some of our guests and by our marine mammal specialist, Gary James, as he made the sleepy eyed protest "those noisy guys woke me up at 5 a.m.!"

The photo above shows one of the noisy culprits, a common dolphin, riding on our bow pressure wave. Everyone had the opportunity to enjoy the serenade that woke Gary. Shortly after breakfast a pod of a few hundred common dolphins milled around, close to the ship. This gave us the opportunity to lower our hydrophone into the water and broadcast the dolphins' underwater communications over our ship wide public address system. We watched in awe and listened with rapture as the sleek animals continued to feed, unconcerned with our presence. Guests standing on the bow also had the startling pleasure of having a blue whale surface for a breath within 30 yards of the ship, its explosive exhalation was most impressive as we were all silently scanning the horizon for blows much further away.

While the sights have been remarkable on this first day of our voyage, the sounds our underwater equipment has enabled us to share have been equally exciting and memorable.