Position: Canna….Can o’ what? Beans?
Weather: Fine as a fine thing, with no rain and lots of sunshine for the first few hours.
Distance travelled: 42 miles-pretty good, eh? Most of that under sail, too.


Another great day on the high seas, and thankfully we’ve all found our sea legs now. Once more food has dominated the day, and we’ve come to the conclusion this is a food marathon, not a marine monitoring trip! So much for ‘basic food’ as it says in the pamphlet…

The crew were joined by Matt for an early morning swim in the chilly waters of loch Moidart, which we sailed out of under blue skies and sunshine after a porridgey refuelling. As the water was fairly calm, Sarah did the first shift on the crow’s nest, from where she spotted the first seals and porpoises of the day.

As the wind was strong enough, the motor was soon turned off, and we were sailing though the blue seas at about 4.5 knots. Acoustic observation was started, and some of us were lucky enough to hear the (not very musical) conversation of some common dolphins, which could actually be seen, but weren’t interested in playing and headed straight on.

Shortly afterwards Juliet (1st officer) and Martin both spotted the blow of a Minke Whale in the distance, but heading to the place, where they had seen it, nothing disturbed the ups and downs of the blue waves, and so we took up our journey to the North again.

Nevertheless we were quite blessed with sightings (actually lost count of the numerous seals, porpoises, jellyfish, and loads of birds). Rotating from the steering wheel to the crows-nest and to duty on deck, we had quite a busy day, but the highlight of it was definitely the two huge basking sharks that we were lucky enough to come alongside. Like two little black sails, slicing trough the water, their two fins were all they showed us, the rest of the body just a murky shadow below the waves as they slowly manoeuvred through the water, doing their sharky thing…. Huh…

One such sighting was promptly followed by the aerial display of a great skua chasing a young gull.

For anchoring we went back to the Isle of Canna, where we had an absolutely marvellous dinner, with self-hunt mussels for starter, beef-pie with veggies and potatoes for main course, a walk around the island and a syrup-cake with custard for dessert.
After that, most of us decided to live on water and apples tomorrow, but we will see….

Log by Sarah and Iris