Anchorage: Tobermory
We woke up in Kerrera today to rather dull and drizzly weather. After our breakfast, Olivia added a new interesting element to our daily surveying – we renamed the creels ‘Bob’ and sightings ‘haggis’. This was a change from the usual calls of creel and sighting; just a bit of fun but it made us think and helped keep us focussed in the poor weather. Throughout the day our sightings, or ‘haggi’, consisted of 12 harbour porpoises and 6 seals. Towards the end of our survey time we detected lots of ADDs on the hydrophone, yet we were still seeing seals. We concluded that ADDs are not particularly effective! After completing our final day of surveying on Silurian, everybody made one final effort to clean the yacht – Laura and Ailidh helped Emma scrub the deck, while Liam, Emma S and Emma W cleaned below deck. Whilst scrubbing the deck, Emma did not notice that Gemma had left the heads hatch slightly open. Obliviously washing away, Emma poured a bucket of water over the window. A scream was heard. Gemma had been soaked! To make matters worse, she had looked up to the window above and received a mouthful of salty water! Following this, much to our relief, we were all able to have showers.
We then enjoyed a meal out, all 9 of us, in the Western Isles Hotel. This was a lovely way to end the day and the expedition. We spent much of the time on land, however, staggering around trying to acclimate to being back on solid ground. We also payed a visit to HWDT’s shop, and all of us bought the famous ‘Whales, dolphins and other sea mammals’ playing cards set.
Finally we returned to Silurian for our final night’s sleep. Emma W bumped her head AGAIN, and so resorted to wearing a hard hat for protection. We experienced the comforting rocking of the boat for one last time as we drifted off to sleep.