Location: West Loch Tarbert, Jura
Position: 55’ 58.12 N 005’ 58.54 W
Distance surveyed: 35nm

This morning, back in England, the smokers will be planning their last legal day of fagging it in public places. Good eh? I say that even though I’m guilty of chuffing away on the evil things myself from time to time. OK, this has little to do with whales and dolphins, but I’m saying this really because the less said about today’s surveying the better. If I were to remove the words, ‘wind,’ ‘rain,’ ‘miserable,’ and ‘biscuits’ from what I was going to write there’d be nowt left to describe. But here goes anyway.
We left Port Ellen after Matt and I had had a brief walk to the recycling bins and then to the CO-OP for a few bits and bobs. (The Werther’s Originals I felt were a particularly wise investment!) Setting off into a looming storm wasn’t the best start to the day we’ve had but at least we weren’t facing into it the whole day – we allowed it to hit us from every angle. ‘Rain, miserable, wind, biscuits’ and there we were mooring in the entrance to Loch Tarbert, having travelled up the east coast of Islay and then NW up the Sound of Islay (between Islay and Jura.) The Loch was reasonably settled when we arrived and so after anchoring, we managed to do some photo-identification. Laura took us through the process, which basically involves using the HWDT catalogue of previously sighted dolphins and comparing them with recently taken photos to see if we can identify the reappearance of particular individuals or the inclusion of new members of a particular pod. We were comparing pictures taken recently of the Barra bottlenose dolphins, with ones identified near Barra a year or so ago. Interestingly we managed to identify all the dolphins spotted recently and even managed to additional dorsal fin images for the catalogue.
For tea, it was chicken stew and some fancy potatoes cooked magnificently by Wendy.
OK, better go now ‘cos we’ve just spotted a Minke whale less than 100m away, but I’d better let Sunday’s blogger tell you more about this encounter.
Byee!
Chris.