Skip to primary navigation Skip to content Skip to footer

Sightings Blog

Penzance

Friday 23rd May

It was a quieter day today with no fins seen, however we had a really lovely afternoon with a great bunch of people. We headed westwards along the coast first , as far as Porthcurno before sailing right out offshore. The endless easterly winds are over for the moment and we had a very sailable…

Tuesday 20th May

We had a four hour trip in the sunshine today on a beautiful calm blue sea. Heading south we picked up a small pod of common dolphins who were just chilling after feeding near some shearwaters and guillemots. They checked us out for a little while before peeling away so we left them alone. We…

Thursday 15th May

Passengers had a fabulous experience on this afternoon’s Ocean Discovery trip, when we found large numbers of common dolphins feeding with countless shearwaters and lots of gannets and guillemots. All had seemed quiet for a while, though it was a beautiful sunny afternoon, with light winds. Distant views of gannets dropping down into the water…

Monday 12th May

A quieter trip today with no marine mammals spotted – at least no alive ones. We did find another dead seal and also what we figured used to be a bottlenose dolphin which had been dead a long time and been pushed down the Channel by the easterlies. The teeth looked massive. We saw a…

A history of Marine Discovery part 1- 20 years old this year!

We can hardly believe it but in May, Marine Discovery will have completed 20 successful years in operation! Here is the first instalment of how we began… When Duncan and I were fresh faced things in our late 20s, we were primary school teachers in Indian Queens and St Austell respectively. While we enjoyed teaching…

Thursday 1st May

Happy May Day! Spring has most certainly sprung, though it was a lot cooler and greyer here than in other areas. We had a lovely trip this afternoon with a great variety of seabirds spotted, including kittiwakes, shearwaters and more puffins! At one site we spotted a group of several male and female Eider ducks…

Wednesday 30th April

It was a great trip this afternoon in the warm spring sunshine. There was still a choppy sea running after the strong wind of yesterday, but it wasn’t too bad. Quite often with easterly wind you can see very little, but today we very quickly found a pair of Risso’s dolphins who cruised past the…

Saturday 26th April

We left the harbour on this mornings Discovery Voyage in the ‘mizzle’ but this defiantly did not hamper today’s sightings. We stumbled across a large amount of seabirds fairly quickly. They mainly consisted of razorbills, guillemots and Manx shearwaters, many of them returning with sandeels in their beaks. Pulling into the island we counted 5…

Thursday 24th April

There was plenty of seabird action today, with big rafts of shearwaters and gannets who had been feeding very recently. There spotted a guillemot with a sandeel still in its mouth – at some point we will see some puffins. There was a grey seal around the island. The tide has been fairly unfavourable for…

Wednesday 23rd April

We had a four hour trip this afternoon – boy it was cold! No fins today, but plenty of Manx shearwaters and fulmars and lots of exciting sailing on that northerly wind. There was a seal hauled out on the island and mating season is clearly underway for the gulls – they have very little…