We’ve had some fantastic trips with whale and dolphin sightings on over 86% of cruises.

We have had some amazing common dolphin sightings, the smallest group we saw was over 500 individuals and the biggest group was about 2000!   There is so much food in the area at the moment with HUGE schools of sardines, which are attracting the common dolphins to Knysna.

But possibly most exciting of all, was the offshore bottlenose dolphin and pilot whale sighting on the 19th February.  It was a first for our skipper David, who, with 7 years in the industry had never seen pilot whales before.

There are two species of bottlenose dolphin, the inshore species (Tursiops aduncus) that we regularly see playing in the waves.  Then there’s the offshore species (Tursiops truncatus) a much larger species (3.8m rather than 2.5m) that is rarely seen on commercial whale watching trips as they live in deeper water and don’t often come inshore.

Pilot whales measure about six metres in length and despite being called whales; they’re actually a species of dolphin.

It was an amazing sighting with the dolphins leaping out of the water and doing complete somersaults just in front of the boat!  One client managed to capture a somersault on his video camera; it jumped out of the water so close to the boat that the client actually got his camera wet from the splash as the dolphin landed back in the water! (The camera still works fine).

The water has been beautifully clear so we’ve had some wonderful shark sightings including great white sharks, hammerheads and bronze whalers.  We even had a 3m great white shark swim right next to our boat!

We’ve also had regular sightings of Bryde’s whales, a resident species of whale that can be found in the Knysna area all year round.  So it’s been a pretty exciting start to the year, we’re looking forward to more fantastic cruises.