Penzance

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

We had a three hour trip this morning in the sunshine and a fairly brisk northwesterly wind, which we haven’t had for a while. It was quiet for cetaceans but we had great views of the seabirds and the coastline was looking spectacular.

After a miserable couple of days of weather, what a great day we had today. It’s often the way that after a strong westerly blow and rain, we get fab sightings and so it was on both the morning and the afternoon Ocean Discovery trips. This morning we saw 3 different pods of common dolphins…

Today we had our first Discover Marine Science day. After the sunshine of last week, in the strong westerly wind it felt freezing! We initially had some introductions to species ID, photo ID and the marine geography of Mount’s Bay in the office, before heading out. There were plenty of grey seals around the island…