Choppy water, scuffed up by the stiff offshore early morning breeze, made snorkeling on the surface difficult. The whales were somewhere ahead of me - I could distinctly hear them clicking - but they were wallowing on the lumpy surface, up-sun, and even when I could snatch a quick glance in their general direction from the top of a tumbling wavelet, they were hidden in the dazzling brassy glare.
There were two of them. We’d seen them from the inflatable Zodiac minutes after the excited cry from the vigia had come over the radio. "Ohhhhhh! Cachalot! Cachalot!" Through powerful binoculars, from within his aerie on the flanks of dormant Pico - the volcano that gives this island in the Azores its name - he’d seen the angled spouts of vapor that clearly distinguish sperm whales from other whales. With precision honed sharp by years as a whaling lookout, and speaking in the native Portuguese, he quickly relayed distance and bearing to Michael, our guide and skipper.
"Cachalot...sperm whales", Michael explained. The outboard bit deep as he spun the wheel, pushed the throttle lever forward, and sent the orange Zodiac zipping and bouncing in a froth of white on blue towards the seaward horizon.
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