Wednesday 16th August

We had an amazing couple of trips today – a four hour Discovery Voyage this morning followed by a two hour Bay Discovery this afternoon. There were cetaceans everywhere we looked this morning – we had great views of two minke whales feeding in the bay this morning, who both came very close to the boat as we sat still in the mirror calm water. There were also many porpoises and common dolphins, lots of seabirds like gannets and manx shearwaters, and also good numbers of seals around the island. We also saw some beautiful iridescent moon and compass jellyfish. On the afternoon Bay Discovery, after watching a few common dolphins we sailed eastwards and saw something we have never seen before. Under feeding gannets there were lots of porpoises feeding again – rushing around like common dolphins. This can sometimes be seen when enough porpoises are gathered hunting shoaling fish – but what we didn’t expect is for the behaviour to get suddenly even more animated and for them suddenly to be rushed by common dolphins who charged in from the south east. They sent the porpoises to ground, but not before the pods had merged and were popping up together. I wonder if this boisterous behaviour is annoying for the porpoises who did all the intial work, or if they are used to it? So many mysteries.