Over five specimens were spotted less than a mile away from the Caprazzoppa promontory, heading east. In the afternoon, a couple of whales, probably belonging to the same pod, were also sighted off the coast of Genoa.

Finale Ligure, 2 September 2022 – An extraordinary sighting of a pod of fin whales this morning off the coast of Finale Ligure: skipper Carlo Mamberto, a member of the Pelagos Group of the Finale Ligure Naval League, spotted a group of five or six large specimens swimming quickly in single file towards the east. ‘A spectacular and unusual encounter, less than a mile from the Caprazzoppa promontory and at a depth of less than 100 metres,’ he said.
In the heart of the Cetacean Sanctuary, a stretch of the Ligurian Sea between the French, Tuscan and Corsican coasts, the stretch of water off Finale Ligure is characterised by conditions that are particularly favourable to the presence of cetaceans. However, this year, sightings by the Pelagos Group have been particularly frequent and significant, not only of relatively common dolphins, stenellas and ziphids, but also of rarer and larger specimens, such as sperm whales and fin whales.
‘Our group brings together many people who go to sea for various reasons: simple boaters, fishermen, skippers, but also marine biologists who work on sighting, researching and photo-identifying cetaceans through identifying marks on their spines, sides and chests,’ explains Renzo Briano, founder of the Pelagos Group. ‘This work is useful for monitoring the routes of marine mammals but also their state of health: empirical data and images are collected and shared with marine biologists, who thus find abundant material to supplement the scientific data in their possession.’

Thanks to the Pelagos Group’s network of spotters, a pair of fin whales, likely belonging to the same pod sighted in Finale Ligure, were also spotted in the early afternoon off the coast of Genoa by Alessandro Verga aboard the Group’s flagship whale-watching vessel.

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