Wednesday 16th July

After a few days off due to strong wind we were back out on the water today. It was calmer though  it rained almost all day. However after a westerly blow like that, if you are prepared to put on your waterproofs and maybe get wet, there is often so much wildlife to be seen and it always make me chuckle when people ask “will the dolphins mind if it’s raining?” No, no they don’t. Today we had a four hour trip followed by a two hour trip, and throughout the day we saw common dolphins, harbour porpoises, bottlenose dolphins, Risso’s dolphins and finally lots more common dolphins. In fact on the afternoon two hour trip, we hardly had to go further south than Mousehole before we’d seen three species of dolphin. Among the birds, we saw diving gannets, Manx shearwaters, sooty shearwaters, countless storm petrels and a pair of marauding Arctic skuas bullying some kittiwakes. After seeing a gull scavenging on a cuttlefish we thought it was Risso’s that we were watching at first, but it was a pair of young bottlenoses. One of them had a really nasty looking injury – I’d be interested to know if anyone else has seen this pair and where.