The first morning at anchor in San Filipe brought us our first encounter with Manoliño. Manoliño is a dolphin, but not just any dolphin. First of all, he is HUGE! And, he is unusually friendly. So much so, that he has become a celebrity in Galicia, where he has made his home since 2019. Of course we didn’t know that to begin with…
After a very quiet night and a nice sleep we wake up from the sound of our anchor chain at 0730h. What’s that? There is no wind. So, maybe a strong current? But we use a bridle on the chain hook and that never makes a sound. Wim jumps out of bed and has a look on deck. It’s still almost dark. Nothing to see. All is very quiet. No wind, no current. He checks the anchor chain and the bridle but all is good. Hm. He stands there, thinking: what the heck?? Then, suddenly a big dolphin pops up right next to him!! It scares the hell out of him! The dolphin turns around, next to the boat, and sprays a fountain of water and dives down with a powerful splash of his tail, spraying water over Wim. Wow! Sher! Sher! A dolphin! Sher jumps in her clothes and comes on deck. In the half-dark we watch in awe how this big guy plays with our anchor chain! He puts his nose under the chain and swims a circle with it, hitting the waterstay with it. That was the noise we heard. We watch him for 20 minutes. Then he disappears. We go back into our warm nest because it’s pretty chilly outside and we weren’t wearing enough clothes.
After breakfast, we notice that our little yellow anchor ball (that indicates the position of the anchor) seems to be gone. We check on the fore deck and we discover that it’s floating under water. The line that goes from the ball down to the anchor and then back to the fore deck appears to be tangled around the chain. We hoist some chain back in and we see a huge spaghetti of the blue dyneema line!
The spool with 100m of this line is almost completely unwound! We forgot to secure it. Obviously, the dolphin had been playing with it and pulling more and more off the spool!
We hoist some more chain and we see many meters of blue line twisted a hundred times around the chain!
It takes us an hour to untangle it all. How did the dolphin do that??
Anyway, we take the ball and the line on board to prevent him from doing it again…
Manoliño came back later in the day and delighted us with his antics. He loves playing with the anchor chain and the loose end of the chain above the snubber. He also loves playing with dinghy lines. He has visited us daily since we arrived and each time we hear the anchor chain rattle, we rush up on deck to take pictures and clap and generally encourage and appreciate his company.
In the afternoon, we are able to catch him on camera:
A day later, two fishermen in a small boat call us: “Delphin! Delphin! He’s Manoliño! He’s very friendly!” He’s playing with our anchor chain again! 🙂
At the same time, Sher has a chat with the lady from the marina Viveiro. She’s from Ferrol. She says, “The dolphin is called Manoliño. He is very famous and playful. He is always in the Ria de Ferrol.” How funny!
After half an hour of playing he disappears. At a distance, he make a few big jumps above the water! (we didn’t catch that on camera, it was too far away).
The next morning, Manoliño visits us again. Sher made a toy for him: our little anchor ball on a blue rope. He likes to play with the rope!
Then, he pulls the rope so hard that it detaches from the railing! He swims away with it! Oh no!
He swims far behind our stern with the ball and then we lose sight of it. After a little while we hear sounds at our bow. He’s back. We look down and see the yellow ball with the line twisted around our anchor chain! He brought it back and knew it belonged there!
What a delight to have discovered Manoliño (or that he discovered us)!
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