Wednesday 23rd July

We had two Ocean Discovery trips today and both were cracking. As we head towards August, the harbour porpoises start feeding in the bay in enormous numbers, and this morning they were here a week or so early. Often the general public aren’t as impressed by the idea of seeing porpoises in the same way as dolphins…until they see them in the kind of numbers we regularly encounter. They great thing about a sailing boat too is the quiet – they have the repuation of swimming off in the opposite direction when they encounter a boat, but because we are quieter they don’t mind – especially when they congregate in greater numbers and are braver. We had repeated encounters with pods of 20-30 at a time, and they were accompanied by some spectacular diving gannets who were pouring into the water with loud THUMP sounds. This attracted a large group of dolphins who charged in from the west, and we then watched them with the gannets too. This afternoon we saw even large numbers of gannets, massive clouds of them filling the sky. We also saw dolphins and grey seals. There are still lots of storm petrels about, both European and a Wilson’s this afternoon.