Voyage of the Toftevaag
dolphin spotting and 'turtle-rodeo' in the Alboran Sea

The ship’s bell rings before daybreak and breakfast is already over by the time we are motoring out of Sotogrande marina into a warm Mediterranean dawn.  
I’m still nursing my second cup of coffee when the Rock of Gibraltar appears like a watermark on the sheet of early mist. Skipper Ric Sagarminaga hands the helm over to his mate Nano and pans his binoculars along the horizon. “If you talk to the yachties and sport fishermen in the marinas, many of them probably don’t even realise that there are whales, turtles and dolphins out here…It’s hard to believe but there you go.”
The air of long-suffering patience that accompanied Ric’s words was an unmistakable by-product of more than a decade spent trying to highlight the incredible natural diversity of an area is that is primarily famous only as one of Spain’s most popular tourist playgrounds.
The region where the cold Atlantic Ocean rushes in through the Straits of Gibraltar to mix with the warm, salty Mediterranean is known as the Alboran Sea. The same rich waters that host vast schools of commercial fish are also the feeding grounds for an incredible variety of predators, including dolphins (striped, common, bottlenose and Risso’s), pilot whales, fin whales, sperm whales, beaked whales, sharks, orcas and three types of marine turtles.
Yet the Alboran Sea has no official protection and over-fishing, over-crowding, pollution and noise are having a bad effect on these creatures. The Toftevaag - a classic Norwegian sailing ship - has become, quite literally, the flagship in the fight to establish a Marine Protected Area (MPA) in what has long been one of the world’s busiest shipping channels.
Principal investigator Ana Cañadas (Ric’s wife) is focusing on the common dolphin as a guide to the health, or otherwise, of this part of the Mediterranean. Over the last decade, the common dolphin has increasingly fallen short of living up to its name. On a typical day at sea, the Toftevaag might encounter 600-800 striped dolphins (primarily squid eaters) but only half-a-dozen common dolphins, searching hard for the schools of anchovies and sardines that were once so abundant here.
The Toftevaag is well known in every port and marina on the Andalusian coast and her classic good looks have helped Ana and Ric to win support from a community that might traditionally have been against the partitioning of their ancestral fishing grounds. But the fishermen are not blind to the declines in catches and many are in favour of a protected area - the spawning grounds that will replenish the nets and long-lines of future generations.
As the sun begins to burn off the sea haze, Jenny Blewett (an English volunteer and keen sailor) climbs the rigging to take watch-duty in the crow’s nest. On a calm sea this can seem like one of the most peaceful places in the world but just a small swell is enough to turn it into a lurching, shuddering rollercoaster ride with the deck sideslipping brutally to leave you hovering twelve meters above the whitecaps.
Jenny soon spots the shadowy slice of fast-moving fins and Ric manoeuvres the ship so that Ana can take notes on such things as bearing, numbers, behaviour and the absence or presence of calves. Ewa Goos (from Sweden) has volunteered to help Ana take photographs for ‘Europhlukes,’ a database - modelled on the FBI’s ‘Most Wanted’ list of criminals - that can identify vast numbers of European cetaceans by the marks on their fins or tails. German Earthwatch veterans, Margrit and Egon, are on ‘harpoon duty’ by the bowsprit, armed with the long poles that are used to collect (painless) skin samples from bow-riding dolphins.
The dolphin’s natural curiosity is the scientist’s greatest ally and unless the animals are preoccupied with hunting they will often approach the ship for a bow-riding session. But a speeding dolphin can travel at up to 25 miles per hour and if the group is moving too fast a splinter group of volunteers sets out in the Zodiac. (One of the highlights of our fortnight at sea was a cruise alongside a pair of fin whales, whose 22-meters seemed to dwarf the inflatable.)
            A fin whale in the Straits of Gibraltar would once have been able to communicate with a ‘distant relative’ in the Caribbean using low frequency sound waves, but since the invention of the propeller the Mediterranean has become, as Ric says, ‘the world’s biggest discotheque.’ Every twenty minutes the ship’s hydrophone is switched on to pick up the squeaks and clicks of dolphins or whales that might be out of sight of the crow’s nest. The cacophony of a group of several hundred dolphins closing in on a ‘bait-ball’ of rounded-up fish is one of the most incredible natural sounds that you are ever likely to hear…but the underlying hum of engines is always perceptible.
As the Toftevaag plied her course across the inscrutable mirror of the Mediterranean, I began for the first time to picture the ever-changing movements, drifts and migrations of prey and predator that were going on below us. The striped dolphins that we found in deep water could only be waiting for the nocturnal upward migration of squid; the bottlenose dolphins that were purposefully moving eastwards past Malaga were probably heading for the rich feeding off the gigantic sea mountain that the Toftevaag had been studying.
            Between watch-duty, data collection, navigation, invigorating swims in the high seas and visits from inquisitive dolphins and pilot whales the day passes all too quickly. Once again it is almost dark by the time the Toftevaag takes her place back among the impervious motor-cruisers and yachts in the marina.
But Ric and Ana’s efforts to document the riches of the Alboran Sea are finally falling on attentive ears and the new MPA has now won the backing of the national and regional government as well as the EU. Thanks to the crew and volunteers on the Toftevaag, the Alboran Sea is finally getting the protection it deserves as one of Europe’s most important marine reserves.

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‘Teenage Turtle Alien Abduction’
loggerhead turtles in the Gibraltar Straits

“Sometimes it seems like what we are looking for are envoys from another world,” Dr Eckert was saying. “Marine turtles are not so much divers as surfacers - it is only during their fleeting visits to ‘our world’ that we are able to have any contact with them.”
            But Scott Eckert has followed these reptiles all over the planet and probably knows as much as anyone living about what they actually get up to in their mysterious submarine lives. Now he has teamed up with the crew of the Toftevaag to solve the mystery of Spain’s threatened loggerhead population.
Every year as many as 30,000 loggerhead turtles are accidentally killed in Spanish tuna and swordfish lines. In keeping with the Alboran Sea’s reputation among marine biologists as an ‘inter-oceanic hothouse of diversity,’ the local loggerhead population seems to be made up, in roughly equal parts, of immigrants from the long-established loggerhead hatcheries in both the US and the eastern Mediterranean. But Dr Eckert admits that experts know almost nothing about why the loggerheads come to the Alboran Sea or what their movements are while they are here.
            The most effective way of gathering this information involves carrying out what Dr Eckert’s assistant Stacy Kubis describes as ‘alien abduction’ on these otherworldly creatures. Even from the lofty vantage point on the Toftevaag’s crow’s nest it takes experience to spot a turtle that is basking just below the surface, but years of working with the green turtles of North Carolina have tuned Stacy’s vision to just the right focus.
            “Turtle! 200 meters at 2 o’clock!” comes the cry from above. We scramble into the Zodiac and within a couple of minutes are easing up behind the giant reptile. Scott leaps into the water and grabs both ends of the turtle’s shell. It might sound like too much fun to be seriously scientific but experience has shown that what the team calls ‘turtle rodeo’ is the only effective way of subduing the animal before it can dive.
            Back onboard the Toftevaag the turtle is measured, weighed, checked for parasites and scanned for hooks. Then a sliver of flipper is taken for analysis and the turtle is fitted with a microchip and a satellite-tracking device. By the time the captive goes back overboard after his ‘alien abduction’ it has an estimated $10,000 - and a lot of Dr Eckert’s hopes - riding on its back.
            A surprising number of the tagged turtles have turned up in Ceuta - a Spanish enclave in northern Morocco - leading Dr Eckert to suspect that they might go there to supplement their Mediterranean squid with a certain crab that periodically ‘infests’ the region. The long ‘development migration’ of turtle hatchlings is motivated by a need to feed and put on bulk quickly, so Dr Eckert had expected to find mostly very young animals around Spain. But most of the reptiles that have been tagged so far are adolescents.
            It takes at least twenty years for a loggerhead to be ready to breed and Dr Eckert points out that such a timeframe is likely to deny the luxury of a second chance at saving the Alboran’s turtles. We need information now if we are to ensure that the majority of Spain’s loggerheads survive the fishing fleet for long enough to return to their nesting beaches in the US, Greece or Cyprus.
            The turtles are a particularly vivid example of how the life-and-death struggle of the creatures of the Alboran Sea could have far-reaching effects in other parts of the world’s oceans.

The End