Key takeaways
- Atlantic spotted and bottlenose dolphins are resident here and appear on the great majority of trips.
- Guests record them repeatedly, usually resting in tight groups at the surface rather than travelling.
- Bryde's whales are recorded here, and guests describe one breaching almost clear of the water.
- Loggerhead turtles, flying fish, seabirds working a shoal, and on one occasion a shark.
Why so much lives here
The island is the tip of a volcano standing on the Atlantic floor, and the ground beneath the water falls off sharply within sight of land. Water that would be far offshore anywhere with a continental shelf is a few miles out here.
That single fact explains everything about the wildlife. Deep water species do not need to be sought at distance, because deep water begins where the island ends. A boat can reach genuine ocean in under half an hour.
It also concentrates life. Sharp underwater relief drives nutrient-rich water toward the light, the shoals gather on it, and everything larger gathers on the shoals. The birds working a patch of water are the visible top of a column of activity that reaches a long way down. Funchal dolphin whale watching draws on water that is unusually productive for an island this size. Dolphin watching Madeira is productive for exactly this reason, and it is why a short trip works here at all.
The dolphins you are most likely to meet
Atlantic spotted dolphins are the signature animal of these waters and the species most often recorded by guests here. They are sociable, they approach boats readily, and they travel in groups that can number well into the dozens.
Their spotting is the interesting part. Calves are born unmarked and develop speckling with age, so a single pod contains animals ranging from plain grey to heavily mottled. To an untrained eye that looks like several species swimming together, which is exactly why the guides carry identification cards.
Bottlenose dolphins are the other resident, larger and more solidly built, and the animal most people picture when they hear the word. Guests here regularly report two distinct kinds of dolphin in a single trip, and this is usually the pair.
Pilot whales
Short-finned pilot whales appear often enough in the review record to count as a regular rather than a rarity. They are technically dolphins despite the name, large, dark and blunt-headed, and they behave very differently from the animals people expect.
The usual sighting is a group logging at the surface, several animals lying almost motionless together with their bulbous heads and low dorsal fins showing. It is a strange and rather solemn thing to come upon after an hour of fast dolphins.
They are deep divers, hunting squid a long way down, and what you are watching at the surface is a rest period between those dives. Guests write about coming across them in flat calm water with the coast behind, which is exactly the setting the photographs show.
Atlantic spotted dolphins surfacing together in clear water off the south coast
The whales
Bryde's whale is the baleen whale most often named by guests here. It is a warm-water species, present in Madeiran waters rather than merely passing, and one guest describes seeing two different kinds of whale on a single trip.
The photographic record from this operator includes a whale breaching almost fully clear of the water, and a fluke raised in front of a boat load of watching passengers. Those are not everyday sightings, but they are not fabricated either.
Far more often, a whale amounts to a slow dark shape breaking the water and a plume of spray carried off on the breeze. That is less dramatic and more affecting than it sounds, largely because of the scale of the thing you are suddenly next to.
Turtles and everything else
Loggerhead turtles are recorded here, and they are easy to miss because a turtle at the surface looks like a piece of floating debris until it moves. Guests describe seeing one alongside two species of dolphin and a whale in the same trip.
Flying fish break out of the water ahead of the boat and glide, sometimes for a surprising distance. Nobody books a trip to see them and almost everybody talks about them afterwards.
Seabirds are worth watching for their own sake and as a tool. A concentration of birds working one patch of sea usually means a shoal, and a shoal often means something larger below it. That is one of the cues the briefing asks passengers to look for.
How close they come
Closer than most people expect, and the boat is not the reason. The method is to approach slowly and then stop, cutting the engines and letting the pod decide what happens next.
Dolphins frequently choose to come. Guests describe animals swimming directly beside the hull, riding the bow wave and passing under the tubes, and calves travelling alongside their mothers within arm's reach of the boat.
That works because the boat sits low and stays quiet. On a taller vessel the same encounter happens several metres below you; here it happens at eye level, on the other side of an inflated tube. Anyone asking about whale watching Funchal best time should know that the resident dolphins are here in every month of the year.
What nobody can promise
Which animals. The operator guarantees cetaceans and delivers on it, but the specific species that surfaces on any given morning is not a decision anybody gets to make. Dolphins are near certain; a whale is a good possibility rather than an expectation.
Behaviour is even less predictable. A breach, a fluke, a pod that stays half an hour: these are the mornings guests write reviews about precisely because they are not every morning.
The honest framing is that you are going out to look, with a fast boat, a biologist and a team of lookouts stacking the odds as far as they can be stacked. What the ocean does after that is the reason it is worth doing at all.
