Key takeaways
- The run out of the marina, the search for wildlife in deep water, the anchored swim stop, and the sail back along the bay.
- Because the seabed drops so steeply here, you are over serious depth within a short run rather than an hour of steaming.
- The stop under the cliff comes after the wildlife search, roughly two thirds of the way through the three hours.
- The last stretch is a slow sail around the marina for the view of the city, not a dash back to the berth.
Checking in and getting aboard
It starts at a ticket counter rather than at a gangway. You check in at the Atlantic Pearl desk at Marina Nova do Funchal, on Cais 8, and the boat is berthed a few metres away. Arriving with time in hand is worth it, because the marina is a working one and finding the right quay for the first time takes a few minutes.
Boarding is over the pontoon and onto the boat, and once aboard the crew give a safety briefing before departure. It covers the layout, where the life jackets are and how the swim stop will work later. This is also the moment to sort out where you want to sit, and the honest advice is not to commit: you will move several times.
Out of the marina and into deep water
The first stretch takes you out past the harbour wall, and the character of the trip changes almost immediately. Funchal's marina sits in a busy piece of water with the commercial port alongside it, and within a few minutes that is behind you and there is open ocean ahead.
This is where Madeira's geology does you a favour. On most coasts the run to water deep enough for large animals is long enough to be tedious. Here the seabed falls away so steeply that you are over serious depth quickly, which means the useful part of the trip starts early rather than after an hour of steaming.
The search, which is most of the time
The longest single part of the three hours is spent looking, and it is worth understanding what that looks like so it does not come as a surprise. The boat works along the coast at a moderate pace with crew scanning, and the pace is deliberate: you cannot find dolphins at speed and you certainly cannot watch them at speed.
When something is found, the boat slows and holds at a respectful distance and lets the animals decide what to do. Frequently bottlenose dolphins decide to come to the bow, which is when everybody ends up on the trampoline nets watching them ride the pressure wave a couple of metres below. This is the part of the trip that reviews are almost entirely about.
3h
The whole cruise, from checking in at the ticket counter to stepping back onto the pontoon at Marina Nova.
West to Cabo Girao and the anchor
Roughly two thirds of the way through, the boat runs west along the coast toward Cabo Girao. This leg is scenery rather than dead time: the south coast west of Funchal is a wall of cliff and terraced slope, and it looks entirely different from the water than it does from the road above.
At the cape the anchor goes down under 580 metres of rock and the ladder goes over the stern. What follows is roughly half an hour of people getting into clear deep water, swimming about, and climbing back out, while others stay on deck with a drink and look up at the cliff. Nobody is obliged to swim and a decent proportion do not.
The sail back along the bay
Then the anchor comes up and the boat turns for home, and the final stretch is a slow run back along the coast and around the marina. It is easy to read this as filler on an itinerary and it is not, because Funchal only really resolves as a city when you see the whole of it at once.
From the water the town reads as an amphitheatre: a bowl of hills rising from the harbour with houses climbing the whole way up and terraces cut in above them. You can pick out the cable car running toward Monte and the working port at the eastern end. With a drink in hand and nothing to do, it is a good twenty minutes.
How the time actually divides
Roughly, and with the caveat that a wild animal does not keep to a schedule: a short run out, the longest block given to searching and watching, about half an hour at anchor for the swim, and a leisurely return. If dolphins appear early the searching block shortens and the watching lengthens. If nothing shows for a while, the boat keeps looking.
What stays fixed is the swim stop and the return, because both are anchored to the clock rather than to luck. That is the useful thing to know when planning your day: three hours means three hours, and you are back at the pontoon when the ticket says you will be.
Getting off and what comes next
The trip ends where it started, at Marina Nova, with a quick landing back onto the pontoon. There is no transfer at the end any more than there is at the start, so you walk off into Funchal and the rest of your day is your own.
That is genuinely convenient given where the marina sits. You are on the seafront in the middle of the city, a short walk from the old town, the cable car station and the promenade. A three-hour cruise that leaves you in the centre of town with the afternoon or evening still ahead is a much easier thing to fit into a holiday than a full-day excursion.
