Monday 29th July

What a day we had on the water today. It started so calm that the sea’s surface was like a mirror. This gave us awesome through-the-water views of not only the hundreds of common dolphins, but also harbour porpoises. It seems that by this stage of the summer, the porpoises are feeding more efficiently which gives them more free time to be nosy! Basically they are acting like dolphins and we’re seeing them constantly investigating us before doing their fast wriggly swim away, and then coming back again. It’s so wonderful to see. The dolphins were very numerous – impossible to estimate numbers accurately, as there will be repeat sightings over the trip, but certainly hundreds. We also spotted and ocean sunfish. Seabirds included feeding gannets and lots of rafts of Manx shearwaters and some common scoters.

On the afternoon Ocean Discovery we first of all had a beautiful encounters with some more very inquisitive porpoises, before spotting a very large adult minke whale. This did a large lazy circle around the boat, coming quite close to us. We heard it blowing like a steam train and even saw the blow clearly which isn’t usual for a minke on a hot day. More porpoise encounters followed, as well as several groups of dolphins. We love these July days!