Tuesday 17th June

A long day today with a Discovery Voyage (4 hour) followed by an Ocean Discovery (3 hour) trip. This morning we had lovely clear views of a harbour porpoise in the early morning calm. It circled repeatedly round the boat, just carrying on with what it was doing. Further offshore all was quiet apart from rafts of shearwaters on the surface, and a few guillemots, razorbills, gannets and kittiwakes. We saw a few grey seals, one of which was rather curious. This afternoon we saw more Manx shearwaters, and then our first sooty shearwater of the year – much more unusual. Near the coast we found a pod of about six Risso’s dolphins, one of which was very interactive and bowrode us on Shearwater II.