Wednesday 28th October

We had a two hour trip this morning followed by a three hour this afternoon in fairly lively sea conditions, especially this morning. There were several seals hauled out on the island early on, who had dragged themselves high above the incoming waves in the most sheltered spot they could find. Clever seals. As we watched another big male surfed in and flumped his way higher, prompting some cross noises from the ones already there. Sailing out into the bay, there was a hefty and rather nausea inducing swell running – we briefly saw a couple of porpoises which annoyingly disappeared very quickly. As we were waiting, a couple of skylarks randomly flew past – several miles out to sea! We then sailed with the waves behind us in towards the Mount.

This afternoon we were debating whether to chop an hour off and do another two hour trip, but heading out the swell and wind had dropped enough to run the full three hours. After watching the seals all squashed together as the tide rose, we slowly motored westwards to see if there were any tuna jumping in the usual spot. No joy today, in fact we didn’t see any evidence of tuna all day. Sailing offshore in search of anything else we saw some gannets gathering not too far away…something jumped and we hope it was dolphins given the conditions. They were porpoises, and we had some really lovely views of them. There was a mum and calf and at least one other, probably more. Sailing back in, we saw several grey phalaropes – they’re still around.

Next trip is on Friday morning, and this will probably the last public trip of the season.