It turned out that the 20th was a great day for a mid-survey break, wet and windy all day, so not even a great day to have a look around the charming town of Fowey. As Robin intimated yesterday I joined the CEFAS Endeavour in Fowey, having been away for the first half of the survey – the first time I haven’t done the full survey in nine years. We sailed at 19:00 and headed out into a still quite bumpy Channel.

We started the morning 56km SW of the Isles of Scilly with showery skies, a sea state of five and a two-metre swell – not ideal conditions. The wildlife seemed to think so too as we had a very slow start, just a handful of birds after over an hour. Robin said, “we’ve got to be positive, there’ll be a feeding frenzy up ahead.” Sure enough, just after the two-hour mark, we could see a melee of birds 1km ahead. This resolved into 250 Gannet, 250 Great Shearwater, at least 12 Sooty Shearwater and a few other birds. The birds were joined underwater by a very large pod of Common Dolphin – at least 200 animals and likely many more than that. It was a manic few minutes and tested the memory as well as the estimating skills.

As can be seen from the map in the photo the today’s transects all join up and there’s only a few minutes to nip to the loo or make a cup of tea between them. The next transect, 22.5, is only short, indeed for the rest of the survey these gaps between transects aren’t normally treated as transects but for some reason known only to the Chief Scientist this one is. There were a few Gannet to be seen but very little else.

The start of the next transect coincided with lunch so we took turns going below for a quick bite to eat, before settling into the afternoon. There was some serious glare ahead, but we didn’t have to look at it for too long as we pulled off the transect for a trawl after 20 minutes. The trawl went smoothly and the sensor over the entrance to the net showed fish had gone in – not always a guarantee there is fish as the sensor doesn’t cover the whole mouth of the net, but the CEFAS scientists were pretty sure on this occasion and decided to haul a little sooner than normal.

Probably just as well they did, as just after the haul in commenced, some staggeringly large shoals of Sardine appeared on the fish sonar. To give you some idea of scale, the shoals are about 50m tall and probably about 200m across (the height scale is different to the horizontal scale). A huge amount of biomass beneath us.

The catch was almost totally Sardine and a decent size. As far as we were concerned, however, this break from transect was incredibly annoying. Minutes after coming off transect we came up to a feeding frenzy made up almost totally of Great Shearwater – about 5000 of them. There was a supporting cast of 200 or so Gannet, 40-50 Sooty Shearwater and a few Manx Shearwater. This group of birds had moved closer to the transect line by the time we had finished trawling and, minutes before we restarted the transect we went passed them again, along with another flock of about 2000 Great Shearwater – so frustrating to have missed out seeing these on transect.

The rest of the afternoon was a bit of a Gannet fest, with hundreds seen feeding as we headed south down transect 23. After the large pod in the morning dolphin had been no where to be seen but late on we had a run of eight encounters with Common Dolphin totalling 49 animals. As the light faded we called time and the Chief Scientist went off in search of fish to sample.

We’ve still got over an hour to run on this transect so we’ll be back here in the morning.