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Archived Years _2005

The Season of 2005

Another wonderful season spent travelling around the islands
and enjoying the spectacular scenery and the wonderful wildlife.

Once again I would like to offer my thanks to all the guests who joined Julie and I this year on our journeys around the islands. The weather was not as good as we would have liked at times, but it never managed to stop us having a great time and getting to see the sights. The whales were particularly impressive at the start of the year and the flowers were superb. In fact I cannot remember ever having seen such splendid numbers of orchids for at least eight years.

Before the undergrowth got too dense I was able to show lots of people the corncrakes on various islands and in fact got these images on Coll near to the two castles at Loch Breachacha.

But across at Mull, there was an unusual gathering of minke whales at the entrance to Loch na Keil. There was a distinct lack of plankton and thus feeding in the middle Minches and these whales had gathered to take advantage of some shoals of sand eels that had congregated in the Loch.

The younger ones were still very keen to approach the boat and see what we were up to

But around us there was intensive feeding by all the whales as well as lots of harbour porpoise.

Earlier in the year a young sperm whale had come into Loch Snizort near to my house on Skye. It appeared to be snarled up with a heavy cable and was not easily approached by boats, hence I got this image from the top of a cliff and at a range of about half a mile. Although the whale stayed around for some weeks, it eventually died and was found washed up on the west coast of the island.

Meanwhile we had seen some great sights on St Kilda, many of the new pics are on the St Kilda page.

Of course visiting the gannet colony is one of the main reasons we visit the islands, and we are able to get pretty close to them. Sadly we will not be getting into or even close to one of the other famous parts of St Kilda : the "Puff Inn" previously a NAAFI run by the army, and now a social club run by the present civilian operators of the radar complex.

Due to some change in the relationship between visitors and the company, access to the Puff Inn and any other facilities has been withdrawn. So we are left with St Kilda being a World Heritage site times two, and yet nowhere for visitors to rest, or any toilet facilities. The National Trust for Scotland seem to have lost track somewhere.

Is St Kilda primarily a World Heritage Site; an SSSI several times over , or is it a radar installation?

Whatever, the civilian complex is not exactly "in keeping" with the rest of the bay!

Meanwhile back on the other islands, the flowers were something else this year.

On all the islands the number of orchids was amazing as was the spectacular colours.

Coll is one of the great places to visit for the machair flowers, and this year was, as usual superb.

	We did have some splendid sights of otters throughout the summer - in fact we were able to follow the development of two families; one at Dorlin and one at Loch Spelve, from a few weeks old to almost independence by September.
	You get the impression this otter is totally unfazed by the big green boat he sees nearly every week!!

One morning we left Spelve early and spotted the family of mother and two kits playing and feeding in the entrance. We watched for about fifteen minutes when the HWDT research yacht "Salurian" came across. I moved out of the way after indicating what we were watching, in order to share this delightful experience. When I spoke to the skipper later, they though we were watching a pair of hooded crows on the shore and never saw the otters at all!! Better stick to cetaceans boys!!

We had some absolutely fantastic views of white tailed eagles this year, on a lot of islands: Canna, Skye, Mull, the Uists and over many parts of the mainland. They are obviously doing very well.

So all in all it was a good season. We had noticed that there was a lack of the usual plankton bloom in May/June and this resulted in a failure of the sand-eels population and of course the young fish which hatched this spring also had little food. sadly this meant that there was insufficient food for the seabirds to maintain a sufficient food supply for their chicks and we saw a massive failure of the auks and kittiwake breeding this summer. Instead of their being thousands of young birds on the water in August/September we saw only handfuls and even the cetaceans struggled to find food.

So thanks again to everyone that came along this year and we hope to see you all in the future!

David

PS. I will have put more additions to the photographic pages of the site which may be worth a look.

Our efforts to Cut Carbon Emissions

A big step has also been to Guideliner herself. The two Volvo Penta diesels have just been taken out and are being replaced with smaller fuel efficient Perkins Sabre engines, which should reduce the carbon footprint of the boat by 50%. Expensive but worthwhile. I would go for Bio diesel but we are unable to get the stuff on the west coast, but when we can I will use it! We already recycle wherever we can and make every effort to source our food produce with care.