Seven hour stars…
We had two glorious seven hour trips on Friday and Saturday. On Friday we welcomed aboard a very keen group of MarineWatch Society members. The trip began straight away with a first for us. One of our resident grey seals was splashing about at the surface with a large catch. As we zoomed in on the photos from my camera, we realised this sneaky seal had managed to win the battle with an octopus larger than its own head! What a greedy guts!
The trip continued to be a success with plenty of our favourite birds showing off their best colours as well as a lone harbour porpoise displaying an unusual behaviour called logging. Because this individual was disappearing for long periods of time under the surface to feed, it just needed an extra couple of minutes to reset on the surface and catch its breath before diving down deep once again.
Just as we thought the trip had quietened down I spotted a group of gannets pouring into the water in the distance. Once we reached the work up we were greeted by a pod of young common dolphins that were keen to bow ride our lovely Free Spirit.
Saturday brought more excitement with calm waters and a mind blowing mass of bait beneath the boat (at one point our sonar display was telling us there was only 18ft of water below us when in fact there was over 190ft - that was how thick the mass of bait fish was).
Of course with this amount of bait came plenty of birds, with Manx shearwaters showing up in their thousands! We then encountered a pod of sun-adult common dolphins launching out of the water. They continued their excited breaches as they came to inspect FS. And the weekend wouldn’t be complete without another visit from a small pod of harbour porpoises.
Photos taken by Em Forster and Jonah Holmes
