"Never give in,never give in, never give in... we will never give in!"

We still had a few days in Sines until the end of fieldwork to try and make up for the bad sampling there last year. I wasn't very hopeful though. Last year, we were never able to find the place were dolphins usually hanged around, and spent many days without seeing anything. To be honest, I was thinking this would be just some quiet last days probably with not that many samples. The day after we arrive inSines two new volunteers arrived. Mafalda was mechanical engineer undergraduate student at IST, and Margarida was a Biology student in University of Aveiro that heard about the project from Zé.

Mafalda

Margarida Ventura

The first day we went out I wasn't very hopeful, but we soon found a group of dolphins and started sampling.We got 3 before they started moving away faster than we could follow. It may seem a small number but in reality it almost than double the number of samples we had for that region. So not so bad. Next day we found dolphins, but they didn't approach the boat, and the next one we saw no dolphins. The typical scenario in Sines! 1st mate left and another volunteer arrived. Susana Gaspar heard about the project from Pedro and had nothing to do with biology whatsoever, but wanted to come on board and take part of everything.

Susana Gaspar

In that day I talked to Sr. Mascarenhas in Sines who owns a nautical gear shop at the marina and he phoned a local fishermen to ask for dolphins. He gave us a position where to start looking. We went there the next day and to our surprise we found a group of common dolphins (after seeing two minke whales!), but not an ordinary group, but a huge group! We started sampling and the number of samples was steadily increasing. At some point I notice on of the dolphins was incredibly similar to a striped dolphin. I was intrigued, thinking this might be a hybrid, when I realized we were actually approaching another large school of striped dolphins. Soon we had one huge mixed school of common and striped dolphins. I had to be careful not sample a striped dolphin by accident. We stopped at 7 when the group started moving away too fast, and it was getting late and we needed to refuel the boat. These last few days were going quite well after all.

Striped dolphins

Common dolphins found together with the striped dolphins

The next day we went looking for dolphins in the same position but they were nowhere to be found. Late in the day, we found another huge group and we started sampling. Sample by sample we got to 10! Sines was now one of the best sampled places, and I was thinking how unpredictable working with these animals can be. You can spend many days without seeing anything, and then in 3 days get almost as many samples as you need. That's why, on board Clavadel we never give in!!!

The next days we didn't get any more samples... we didn't even saw any dolphins (but we did saw an immature common tern that decided to rest on Clavadel for a while!), but fieldwork was pretty much done, and the number of samples obtained represented not only a major effort, but also a major success. Even though we were all getting tired, our success made it all worth it. We were ready to sail South confident that we had done a good job!