Wednesday 22nd July

It was a cooler windier day today than we have had for ages. It was a northerly breeze though so it wasn’t rough and there was no incoming swell, so everything was quite comfortable. This morning we once again had great views of harbour porpoises, numbering about fifty. They swam very close to the boat. We also had brief views of pod of Risso’s dolphins who REALLY didn’t want to be seen, as well as a couple of hauled out seals, and two in the water. A peregrine falcon flew right over our heads, which doesn’t happen too often out at sea.

This afternoon the wind had increased more so we reefed right down and headed out to where we could see gannets feeding. It seems the gannets are mainly associated with porpoise feeding at the moment rather than common dolphins. We saw staggering numbers of them, in several different pods. Some were spotted actually chasing us down – we could see their bodies surfing through the waves. The last really big group we saw were with some really spectacular sustained gannet feeding, who were firing into the water repeatedly. I took loads of photos and was hoping some of them would be pretty good, but  very annoyingly the disk corrupted. Hopefully tomorrow will bring some more!