Day four was a quiet day for us, the fish sonar needs calibrating at some point during each survey, and it’s done while drifting in calm waters. Today there were plenty of calm waters, so this was good. However, some of the equipment was not working correctly, one of the motors was playing up but with a bit of twist and shout it sparked into life. If you’re lucky the calibration can be over in a few hours, if you’re not it can take most of the day. Today, we were unlucky, it took six hours, a bit of a misery for all involved.

We did eventually manage to resume the survey just after 16:00 from the same place we had finished the previous evening. Within a few minutes the first Common Dolphin appeared, there followed another six encounters over the next 90 minutes involving a total of 119 animals. This is more than we had seen on the rest of the survey combined, don’t ask me why we had very few dolphin on the previous transect a few miles away from this one and loads here. Also, another ‘tuna boil’ was sighted, not as large as the previous one but there were in the region of 50 tuna feeding with Gannet diving round them.

There had been quite a few birds as we steamed to the transect but by the time we started the numbers had dropped a lot. We did see another group of 10 Storm Petrel swooping back and forth in front of the ship, always a highlight.

The day’s proceedings, for us observers at any rate, came to an early end to allow a trawl to take place. Late afternoon/evening trawls are not always good news for the fish scientists who have to analyse the catch!
We resumed Transect 37 on the morning of the 9th. As quite often seems to be the case there were a lot of birds around when we came up to the bridge but most had gone by the time we started. A Chiffchaff was seen landing in front of the bridge. One of the scientists had been in the garage earlier and what we think was the Chiffchaff landed on his head.

Just before 09:00 a few Common Dolphin were seen coming into the starboard bow. Chains of them kept on coming until an estimated 150-200 had come into the ship, the largest pod to date. Just after this we broke off transect for another trawl.

This trawl produced another good sample including Anchovy, Spratt, Sardine and Horse Mackerel. Despite the good catch there were no birds attracted to the net as it was retrieved, make of that what you will but it suggests there may not be many birds nearby. There was a pod of Common Dolphin that had stayed with us throughout the trawl, curiously these where only on the starboard side of the ship not venturing onto the port side.
We got back onto the transect with very little sighted for the rest of it and, after three days, we finally got to the end of Transect 37. Next up was Transect 54 on the French side of the channel.

Having taken three days to complete the previous transect we did this one without any breaks and finished by dinner time. There were quite a few sightings of tuna, these were all in small groups or singles and a single small pod of Common Dolphin came in for a bow ride.

Most notable on the bird front was a group of about 30 Balearic Shearwaters that crossed in front of the ship, the first seen for a while and a good number to record. Close in to the French coast is often a favoured place for the Balearics to hang out.

What have we learnt today:
• There’s a place in transect 37 that the Common Dolphin really like.
• Transect 37 dolphins are starboard-leaning preferring that side of the ship