At least one member of the team was delighted about the soggy weather yesterday and a day ashore. Nothing like a long, wet, muddy walk in the stubble!

*FIN WHALE* A VERY rare and exciting sighting on Saturday! After a pretty long, cold, wet day we set off on the last trip under yet another massive downpour. Not a great start. However as we cleared the Sutors, the rain went off and the sun came out. Things were starting to look up... We decided to make the most of the improvement in the weather and to head out a bit further than normal. After about and hour and a half of scanning and searching without any luck we started to head for home. Then suddenly a big blow about 400m off our Starboard bow! With excitement building we slowly approached and waited. And waited. No sign of anything but it seemed a good point to stop awhile, enjoy some hot chocolate and see if anything might just appear. With perfect timing no sooner was the chocolate poured when when a huge glassy footprint appeared next to the boat. Chocolate and cups went flying while everyone dived for cameras and a large whale slowly rose to the surface alongside and continued to circle us for about 20 minutes. Initially we thought it was probably just a particularly huge Minke but the first blow and the way it was surfacing just didn't feel quite right. Anyway long story short when we got ashore and downloaded the pics and circulated them with some folks who have much more experience in ID - ing Fin Whales, the consensus seems to be that that is almost certainly what it was. Not a huge one but still an incredible sight. A pretty rare sight in the Moray Firth and a first for EcoVentures and also for me! Fantastic to share it with some lovely folks on board includng Tim 'The Whale' Stenton, many thanks to him for circulating his excellent pics to help with confirming the ID.

Great day on the water for Dolphins but it was the Seals that stole the show. Firstly a lovely encounter this morning with a very snoozy laid back big Grey then an hilarious encounter this afternoon with a Harbour Seal who had clearly decided it wanted to be a Dolphin! We often see Seals around Dolphins without much interaction between the two but this one was right in amongst the group of Dolphins rolling around and swimming along beside them and under them for a full 15 minutes and was still with them when we left the group. Had a slight concern that the Dolphins may lose patience and that it might get the 'Porpoise' treatment but they seemed very happy to tolerate the little imposter. Really fun to see :-)

Last minute availability at the very lovely The Factor's House.....

Fun day on the water with BBC Scotland #Landward filming Lighthouse Field Station - University of Aberdeen and University of Aberdeen MSc students trying out some acoustic monitoring techniques.

In this part of the world dog walking can also mean Dolphin watching.... :-)

September is always one of the best months to catch a glimpse of the newest little additions.....

Well as the saying goes without the rain there would be no rainbow. And August provided us with quite a few. Thanks to all who braved the downpours and big shout out to our shore crew who have had a near full time job drying suits....!!!

What a difference a day makes, shower dodging to brilliant sunshine! The view from our office window never the same two days running.... 😉

One of the highlights for us this year has been our encounters with young Spirtle, the sunburned Dolphin. Last year after her stranding when we saw her she was always out on the periphery of the group, surfacing very rarely and never seeming keen to interact with the other members of the group or approach the boat. What a different Dolphin she is 12 months on. We have had regular encounters with her over the Summer and she has become one of the most boistrous, sociable and active of all the Dolphins we see. Here she is enjoying some seaweed with some other juveniles. Great to see what a recovery she has made.

We were just sitting having our hot choccie and biscuits under the lee of the cliffs and about to turn for home tonight when this lovely, big, active group of Dolphins appeared. Perfect end to a breezy day!

As anyone who joins us on a trip will know, we make sure to tell everyone that the Dolphins here are wild, free and not fed or trained in any way...... You can see then why this perfectly placed creel buoy made us laugh :-)