This week has seen another fantastic survey for our team of ORCA Marine Mammal Surveyors on board the Isles of Scilly Travel’s Scillonian sailing from Penzance-St Mary’s.
The team were lucky to record 23 sightings and four incidental sightings of over 60 individual animals, with total numbers shown in the table below:
Team Leader Neil shares the team’s experience below:
"We all met as usual outside the Dolphin Inn in Penzance at 0815hrs. Before sailing we had plenty of time to have a coffee, a snack, and as it was Angela’s first survey since completing her Marine Mammal Surveyor training earlier this year, time to go through the protocols and generally refresh our knowledge on how to survey and record the cetaceans we would hopefully be seeing.
Weather conditions were near perfect as we left Penzance. We had calm sea conditions and clear visibility, raising our hopes of getting some good sightings, despite hearing from the crew that recent reports had been few and far between!
Within 10-15 minutes of beginning the survey, we had sightings of harbour porpoise from Cheryl on the starboard side. This was soon followed with Angela calling her very first sighting off the port side of a pod of four dolphins. We were able to identify these as bottlenose dolphins.
Sightings of harbour porpoise and common dolphins continued at regular intervals all the way along the south Cornwall coast and out into the open water between the mainland and the islands. We didn’t have much time to explore St Mary’s, due to a quick return time, but managed to grab a quick sandwich and coffee on the quay!
The return trip to Penzance resulted in a similar amount of regular sightings soon after leaving St Mary’s and included small pods of common dolphins, three separate sightings of Risso’s dolphins, a sunfish and a report of a minke whale from one of the passengers.
Overall we had an amazing survey with 22 sightings and four incidental sightings recorded, giving us a total of over 60 individual animals. Angela handled the variety of species and number of sightings brilliantly for her first survey. All in all, a really successful and enjoyable survey!"
Thank you to Neil, Cheryl and Angela for their hard work on what sounds like a fantastic survey.
Have you had an amazing survey experience recently? If you have, we would love to hear from you at [email protected].