Friday 31st July

A massive thank you to everyone who has visited us in July, including familiar faces and new ones. You have helped make this month our busiest ever. The other thing that’s helped has been the weather of course – we have never known such a long settled spell except maybe during the first Covid lockdown. We desperately need some rain now but there looks to be nothing substantial on the horizon.

Lots more common dolphins this morning on the first Ocean Discovery trip. They were feeding, travelling and interacting with us on the catamaran. We also saw gannets, Manx shearwaters, some grey seals on the island and at the end of the trip a pod of Risso’s dolphins! They waylaid us as we were heading in, and there were some more towards the middle of the inner bay too.

This afternoon we started at the island where there was a heap of what looked like three large adult seals. On closer inspection this turned out to be three large adult seals (including Seaweed and Kelp – bit of a theme with their names there), plus two smaller seals wedged in between them. It’s nice to see Kelp next to the others – she’s usually such a stroppy madam who likes her own space! Heading south we soon picked up our first group of common dolphins – a group of three adults and a juvenile who were extremely interested in swimming round the boat and looking up at us. We had been drawn out southwards by some crazy intensive gannet feeding on the horizon, but typically this was incredibly mobile and kept moving. At one point we saw a single porpoise with it, so I think it was tuna driven with porpoises feeding around the edges. Heading back in we picked up a few more groups of common dolphins, some of which “mugged” us and then completely disappeared. The last group were much easier to see and we watched them hunting with gannets and gulls.