All the ferry best for Verena!

Verena' last day with us on the ferry yesterday, before heading back to Germany and her place in Heidelburg University to study biology. All who have met and worked with her will have been impressed by her good humour, common sense and problem solving capabilities, we will all miss her, Good Luck Verena!

She has been an outstanding volunteer, helping Dr Rob Davies to sort out the teething problems of our new Arcview GIS recording system which is now up and running. She also managed to transfer all our previous ferry sightings onto the system and is the main author of the new Sea Trust Stena Ferry Report we hope to launch at the end of the month. The main reason for the trip was to test the fool proofing of the system with me (the fool) doing the data entry. I managed fine, it works, it is now officially foolproof !!!

Allthough some of our ferry surveys back in July rank as some of the best, the weather was not so good on Saturday and we only had three sightings. These included two porpoises and some Risso's that we did not see until they were alongside us, close enough to see them and a small calf, visible underwater as they dived to avoid the ship.
There have been Bottlenoses seen from the ship and from the shore in recent days around Fishguard Harbour but they were gone as we came into Fishguard at lunchtime. It is interesting to note that although we see bottles reasonably often in Fishguard Bay, the number of sightings from the ferry are few and far between...

Great to see the Swansea-Cork ferry sightings of Fin Whale, thanks Peter. It will be interesting to see if we can locate them again from the "Celtic Wildcat" on Friday, hopefully the weather will allow us to get out there!