The day began with glorious sunshine – something which stayed with us for the majority of the day, quite a rare occurrence in the Hebrides! Almost as soon as we had set off we had the first sighting – a group of harbour porpoises. We motored through the Sound of Sleat and then headed southwest towards Canna, where there have recently been a number of basking shark sightings. It wasn’t basking sharks we found there, but loads of porpoises, all acting very energetically and some even coming really close to the boat – most un-porpoise like! We even had an encounter with a juvenile minke whale, which surprised us all by surfacing next to the boat while we were with a group of porpoises – it didn’t hang around though and soon gave us the slip. We weren’t too disappointed though as sighting conditions were about as good as they get in Scotland and we even caught sight of a whale surfacing over 3 km away!

As we travelled south of Canna we circumnavigated Hyskeir and then the ever vigliant Debbie gave the shout ‘A fin! A fin!’ – we had come across two adult basking sharks!! They seemed totally unconcerned by our presence and we now think that they were courting – they spent a long time following each other round in circles and then gave an impressive display of ‘synchronized swimming’, where they stayed almost motionless in the water, moving their tail fins in unison. There seems to be a theme developing with this trip!

We left them to it and carried on surveying back up towards Skye, heading for the beautiful Loch Harport. That was the end of the sightings for the day but we all felt extremely lucky with what we had seen. Once we had anchored some of the volunteers escaped ashore for an hour or so, before surprising the crew by going for a swim (those of us who work up here know how cold the water is, no matter how enticing it looks!)!

Log by: Penny