Anchorage: Cheese Bay, North Uist
Position: 57° 39’.100N 007° 05’.500W
Distance Travelled: 45 NM

We set off from underneath Duntulm castle with overcast but promising weather and headed roughly west south west on the first leg of a series of zig zags that would take us back and forth across the Little Minch without knowing what excitement lay ahead. The beginning of the animal frenzy started with a sighting of a group of storm petrels. After the storm petrels, Dave our skipper requested some dolphins and Susie replied “I’ll see what I can do”, and within minutes a group of common dolphins were in sight, coming to join us and bow ride along with the boat. Amongst them were 3 calves in a group of seven which was a lovely sight to see. As we continued along this transect, we reached Waternish Point on Skye, where things got a bit exciting. We first saw a minke whale, rapidly followed by two basking sharks and several porpoises and diving gannets. The climactic end to the encounter was a sighting of 6 Risso’s dolphins – 3 mothers and 3 calves. One calf made a good attempt at pretending to be an acrobatic bottlenose dolphin – not quite so graceful but fun to watch. As we headed to our anchorage site in Cheese bay on North Uist, the sea flattened, and we saw a plethora of porpoises. We Finished our day with some adventurous island bagging.