Friday 26th June

It was very windy with the thunderstorm last night until morning, so the sea was in a bit of a confused today. On this morning’s three hour trip we motored slowly up the coast into the incoming waves, stopping at the island to sea the sleeping seals. Then we hoisted the sails and headed out, where we had a lovely encounter with some porpoises. They have arrived back with a vengeance it seems. The pod – including mother and young calf – did some very un-porpoise like behaviour, circling the boat and getting a good look at us. We also had lovely views of gannets.

This afternoon the swell was still quite big, but the sun came out and the wind dropped a bit so we were able to do the full four hour Discovery Voyage. We decided to stay close inshore and head along the coast first and we’re very glad we did. A scavenging gull told us there were Risso’s near and soon afterwards we spotted the first one. This was incredibly elusive and disappeared again, but then further south we spotted a few massive leaps. It was more like bottlenose dolphin behaviour. Again this one disappeared so we headed back inshore where we then found a group of four animals. We were inspected closely which was a real privilege for usually rather un-curious animals. (Sorry Mark 🫣😥). Sailing offshore later on, we had a brief encounter with a single common dolphin, which is a bit unusual.