Strange Day At Strumble 17/09/2016

A strange day indeed! Everything pointed to a good day ahead. The weather was fair with a dropping northerly wind and it was a big tide on the ebb shortly after I arrived. For an hour I saw nothing with no Gannets hunting close in and only a small group of gulls below the lookout bobbing away on the water. A short moment of excitement as a Peregrine flashed by below at high speed and then it was back to looking at open water. Richard spotted a lone Risso well out but I failed to see it and again later he spotted it going back east to west but again I missed it. I caught a single porp off the point and that proved to be the only porp shot of the day. The day was saved when a pod of around twenty commons showed up about a mile out which then split up into groups of three or four hunting around for about twenty minutes before moving off to the west on the tide. A few fleeting glimpses of porps as the low tide approached and that was it. Even off the lighthouse where you would expect to see several porps at that state of tide there were only the odd one or two over a long period. Strangely, as the title suggests four guys appeared out of the sea and were climbing up the ridge on the seaward side of the lighthouse. Not something I would attempt and I wonder what might have happened if the ebb tide in full 8-10 kn flow had snatched them away. I shudder to think. The last sighting was of a young seal pup making it's way out to sea, no doubt it had just left the beach by the island.

The tide flowing behind these guys was like a river in full flood. You have to question the sense of it.

                     Fresh off the beach and making his/her first forray into the big bad world.