Friday 4th September

Strong wind overnight meant the swell was quite big today. When we get big south westerly winds at this time of year it often brings in the pelagic seabirds and we saw some brilliant ones today. It’s always pretty cool to see these amazing ocean wanderers on just a three hour trip from Penzance – no chumming necessary! On this morning’s tour at one point we saw 23 great shearwaters sitting in a raft on some big waves, along with a single sooty shearwater. There was also a great skua spotted harassing the gannets, and the tiniest of all of them, lots of European storm petrels. This was along with hundreds of common dolphins.

This afternoon it was all still going on, though unfortunately the disk corrupted on the camera, meaning we couldn’t upload any photos. Hundreds of common dolphins were still hunting, a little bit closer in this time along with hundreds of gannets, several more great shearwaters and lots more little storm petrels flitting about. On our sail back in, under a small collection of gannets we stopped to look, thinking it looked very porpoisey, and sure enough large numbers of them appeared it two separate groups. This was very satisfying, as we haven’t seen porpoises for a while. There were also four seals hauled out on the island.

Thanks to everyone came along today! They all seemed to enjoy it a lot, despite getting pretty wet!