Correeira

Today is Russ’s birthday and we had a boat trip organised to go and see the dolphins and caves. After a late breakfast and a chilled morning we drove to the marina at Albufeira for a 12:30 launch.
After donning our life jackets and getting a brief safety check we climbed aboard our zodiac fastboat with 20 other people and off we went. 10 miles out to sea and we saw a couple of pods of Dolphins, some of the other passengers thought it was the best thing ever and one lady even said this was the best day of her life but in all honesty it wasn’t that impressive. By the time we had caught up with the dolphins they were diving for 10 minutes then we’d have to wait for them to surface and catch them up again and repeat the whole process again. What we were disappointed with was the boat handling. The boat only stayed on one side of the dolphins and never turned so people in one side couldn’t see to get pictures but Russ was only there for the caves really.
Off we went again, 10 miles back to the coast and along abit and the first cave was the Bengali Cave. Unfortunately it was packed with kayakers, bodyboarders and swimmers, not to mention the numerous other tour boats trying to get in. Again our boat seemed to just nose in and then back out, unlike the other boats that seemed to do a 360° turn giving everyone a good view. Russ was disappointed but he marked the cave off on his phone to come back.
Then it was back to the shore, 30 miles in total and 2 hours. We had a small lunch of baguettes and then went shopping for a bbq tomorrow and on the way back to the villa we stopped at the local chapel of bones in alcantarilla. It wasn’t as large as the big one in Faro but it was still impressive and Russ got some good shots. Then it was back to the villa to unload the shopping and spend the evening chilling with tripod the 3 legged cat. Colin then gave us the keys to the car so Russ could go back to the caves in the morning and hopefully get a drone shot.Read more