Sunday 31st May

We had a final Ocean Discovery trip to finish the half term this morning. After a quiet start to the season, this week has seen beautiful weather and a lot of very welcome visitors – both humans and animals! We watched some seals at the island at the start of the trip, including our favourite –  the grumpy old lady “Kelp”. After hoisting the sails and starting southwards we then had another fab encounter with the pod of bottlenose dolphins which has been hanging around the bay the last few days. There appeared to be more of them than yesterday. My photos weren’t great unfortunately, as I missed a few times they were jumping. You can tell from a distance they are bottlenose dolphins, even silhouetted against the sun, as they are very much bigger and their jumps are more deliberate and slow motion looking. We didn’t follow after they had left us, as they obviously had decided the encounter was over. We then sailed southwards and saw some really big groups of shearwaters, including one Sooty shearwater.

The settled weather looks to be over for the moment, but hopefully it will calm towards the end of the week. On Friday we have the first of the planned 5 hour Discovery Adventure trips – we’ll see if the forecast allows it.