The purpose of our pelagic cruise was to get out into the Celtic Deep, twenty odd miles west of Milford Haven our quest to locate uncommon sea birds with the hope of Wilsons Petrel then the equivalent of the holy grail for European birdwatchers. (Interestingly Wilsons Petrel a very common in the Southern Ocean but rare in the northern hemisphere!)
Apparently Juan's father was a chemist and had got hold of some magic elixir that produced the smell of rotting seaweed seemingly a irresistible attractant to petrels. We motored out in perfect conditions spotting the commoner sea birds and then the skipper said we were over the Celtic Deep.and cut the engines Juan and Dave started chumming Dave valiantly adding his breakfast and a Fry's chocolate cream bar which he had no doubt consumed en route to aid this addition.
Anyhow cutting the story short we succeeded, Juan's magic potion brought in not one but two of these beautiful little birdy ballerinas dancing long legged with their yellow webbed twinkle toes pattering the glassy surface as their smaller cousins flitted around like a storm petrel ensemble.
So birdy challenge achieved, we began motoring back to port.
To the bird brains aboard the Sabre Tooth it was an uneventful journey but the big revelation for me was the pods containing scores Common Dolphins that kept coming in to briefly bowride as we ploughed on towards Milford.
Since that trip I have spent thousands of hours on boats in the southern Irish Sea being thrilled by these playful little cetaceans. We formed Sea Trust in 2003 and produced a report in 2005 on the Common Dolphins for The Countryside Council for Wales.. Since then we have continued to study and record them both from small boats, (the Cartlett Lady and Celtic Wildcat )and also from our Stena Europe Ferry surveys. The obvious thing we have seen is the fact that the majority of pods seem to be mainly made up of pregnant females sub-adults and females with calves. Our data collected over the past decade and a half strongly suggests that we have a very high concentration of Common Dolphins in the waters adjacent to our Pembrokeshire Coast and they appear to consist of a majority of breeding females. We know from our colleagues in Cardigan Bay that they are rarely seen north of Fishguard, and one or two forays beyond the Irish Sea suggested that numbers further out into the western approaches towards Cherbourg were much less highly populated. We really need to get a handle on this in terms of the importance of our waters internationally to the wider population of Common Dolphins. If as we believe the sea area we have been studying is an important maternity area there needs to be some kind of real protection for them.