Marine Discovery Penzance

31/01/2025

Edit - the whale has been freed!

Hopefully this has a successful outcome.

As humpback whale sightings numbers increase round our coasts, they will inevitably come into areas of human activity. There have been deaths, but there have also been successful disentanglements 🤞

Help us rescue an entangled whale 🙏

*UPDATE: The whale is now free! However, currently exhausted and we will continue to monitor*

This morning we were alerted to an entangled humpback whale off the coast of Skye, Scotland. The whale is entangled in a rope and is unable to swim freely.

🚨 We kindly ask members of the public, and those in boats, to please refrain from traveling to the area as this could hinder our rescue operation 🚨

Our Large Whale Disentanglement Team has mobilised from across the UK and the rescue is currently ongoing. These rescue operations are extremely dangerous and cost us thousands of pounds to train our team and get them to rescue locations.

We would be extremely grateful to anyone who can help us fund this rescue and hopefully allow us to try to ensure this incredible animal can once again swim free. We will try our very best. Thank you 💙

📷 Anthony Rigell

29/01/2025

We are featured in the March issue of the Coast magazine - the article is about a wonderful weekend in Penzance the writer had with her young son. A trip on "Shearwater II" was the first thing they did!

23/01/2025

The calm before the storm/s.

This evening in Penzance. There's barely a breath of wind at the moment

21/01/2025

Who saw this?!?!? WOW!!!!

Great piece Rupert. Awesome footage! Even Chris was nearly lost for words!

I’m very excited to announce that a sequence that I have been working on for the last couple of weeks is going to be aired on the opening episode of Winterwatch 2025! I’m not going to give too much away, but as you can guess from the photo it involves Dad (The Lone Kayaker) and some rather large fish...

17/01/2025

On our trips we talk a bit about how far grey seals can roam - between countries even! Here's a visual representation of the travels of a few tagged seals. It always intrigues me what drives these little ones to set out towards the horizon with no idea what's out there.

I like the one who almost got to Brittany, before deciding "nah" and turning around.

15/01/2025

The 2025 schedule is now online and available to book at www.marinediscovery.co.uk . The plan like last year is to start in mid March and go on if we can into November. At the start and end of the seasons, trips are not scheduled to run every day, but during the mid to high season we will run two or three per day, depending on weather of course. Have a look at the trip descriptions before booking to make sure what you're booking is the suitable choice for the people in your group, paying attention to the age guidance. Also when you have booked please look through the information you receive very carefully! Have you booked the day you were intending to book, for example?!

Remember this schedule is not set in stone at this early stage - if you look and there's a trip you want on a certain day and it doesn't look available, please give me a call on 07749 277110 and I will alter things if possible.

Private charters are also available - more info coming soon!

We are also thinking about offering an shorter evening experience with the emphasis on sailing the catamaran, when guests can take part in the crewing if you like, or sit back and just enjoy the sail if that floats your boat (thank you, I'm here all week....)

08/01/2025

We had a fantastic year of sightings and science at Marine Discovery Penzance in 2024! These pictures celebrate some of our achievements and showcase our monthly sighting rates for different species. The graphs illustrate the percentage of trips that observed each species by month. To be clear, this is % of TRIPS rather than days, and we generally do two trips a day, often rising to three in July and August. These range from two hours to four hours long.

We take pride in being completely transparent about the likelihood of seeing various species during our tours. That’s why we post honest daily updates to help create realistic expectations.

Mount's Bay is a special place, and our sighting rates are typically very high in comparison to other areas in the UK and beyond. The scientific research we’ve been conducting since 2008 enhances our understanding of how animals use the Bay. This not only increases our chances of finding wildlife but also ensures we always have interesting, up-to-date information to share during our tours.

We look forward to seeing you in 2025 and can’t wait to see what it has in store for us.

03/01/2025

Hello everyone, cold isn't it? 🥶

There is a lot of wildlife to be spotted from land at the moment with reports of humpback whales, tuna and dolphins off Newquay, common dolphins and Risso's dolphins from St Ives, and a huge number of dolphins really close to shore in Mount's Bay. All can be seen from dry land.

People have been asking when they can book for the forthcoming season. The answer is, give me a couple of weeks and I'll have the 2025 schedule up on the website and available to book at www.marinediscovery.co.uk . It usually takes a little while to devise and is always my New Year's task. I'll let you know when it's done.

In the meantime, I'm dreaming of summer days out at sea.....

01/01/2025

A very happy new year to all our followers, old and new. It's time for me annual round up of 2024 and some of my favourite photos. To warn you, this will be very much a stream of consciousness rather than being structured in any way! Please have a look through and a read :)

It was quite a normal year by recent standards - but this is very much a new normal. By this I mean, hugely consistent sightings of common dolphins almost right through the season now - it used to be that they arrived in large numbers in early July and stuck around for the summer before dwindling in autumn. Now we are seeing them regularly earlier in the season (with April and May being relatively quieter), and numbers remain high right through the autumn and into winter.

We started the year with the dramatic entanglement of the humpback whale "Ivy" on the 31st March. This was really memorable - humpbacks had been sighted regularly through the late winter all round the coast, and when poor Ivy got stuck in that fishing gear, she had been regularly sighted for the previous three months. However, very curiously, after that day and her lucky rescue, there were no more reported humpback whale sightings in Cornwall for months (and I stress "reported" of course).

Other whale sightings were all minkes in Mount's Bay; there was talk of a possible fin whale, but I'm certain it was a minke based on blow, size in relation to surrounding dolphins, and fin shape. July was a particularly good month for this season, possibly because of the settled weather.

We spotted Risso's dolphins at regular intervals through the late spring and summer, though not as many or as often as in 2023. We are starting to gather some really interesting data on their movements and diet now, and a lot of work has gone into linking up with other areas in the UK and in Brittany to compare ID photos.

After a good July weather wise, August was a disappointment with lengthy spells of grey sky, strong wind and difficult sea conditions. We still managed to do a good numbers of trips though, and cetacean sightings remained excellent. Like last year, large numbers of Cory's, Great and Sooty shearwaters arrived at about the same time the bluefin tuna did. Curiously they stuck around until the end of our season in November and so did a lot of Manx shearwaters. These are always described as migrating to South American waters in the early Autumn. I'm not sure what other observers recorded round the rest of the country and if anything "official" has been made of this, but something seems different in the world of shearwaters.

Harbour porpoise sightings were quietish for the first half of the summer, but towards the end of July, numbers of them built phenomenally in Mount's Bay. We would regularly find feeding pods of porpoises numbering fifty, sixty, seventy, and witnessed too some exciting breaching behaviour (associated with courtship).

We continue to monitor the numbers of seals at the local haul out spot, and to recognise seals who have been there for many years now, including Kelp the female and Seaweed the bull seal who is now enormous. I still mourn Silverback 😭 but then I'm a softie like that.

Sunfish numbers continue to show a downward trajectory making them more of an exciting occasion when we do see them. Now that they are more unusual, we have more and more people arriving for their trip and exclaiming they would LOVE to see one! Well in June and July we can sometimes oblige.

And with the invertebrates, interesting sightings included the invasion of the salps and the mauve stingers - the latter is a species not often recorded round here and it caused some havoc during an attempted swim challenged from Land's End to Scilly. They really do have quite a nasty sting, so watch out if they reappear next year.

It's important to remember that booking a trip with us helps us continue to add to our long standing effort based data set. Not only does this allow us to spot trends and locate wildlife during trips, but it has also helped graduates and post graduates write their projects, dissertations and theses. It's also of course used in our own studies, presentations and presented to organisations like Cornwall Wildlife Trust for their own reports. Data that is robust enough to contribute to meaningful research is really important, so thank you for enabling us to continue doing this.

I've already said way more than I was going to, so I'll end by saying thank you for your support and we look forward to seeing lots of you in 2025

Hannah, Duncan and team

24/12/2024

Merry Christmas from the team at Marine Discovery Penzance. Thank you for all the support in 2024. We look forward to sharing our adventures with you in 2025 and welcoming you onboard.

22/12/2024

It was another fun, wild and totally bonkers day/evening in Penzance yesterday when people gathered to celebrate the Winter Solstice with the Montol festival. The wet weather didn't dampen sprits.

What a great event this is.

Fab photos by Greg as usual

18/12/2024

And still these emails keep on coming 🙄

Oh happy day! We have received (yet another) email telling us that we have been shortlisted for an award - by (yet another) organisation no one seems to have heard of. For context, we receive a few of these a month, then when we ignore it, they bombard us with more "ARE YOU SURE??" emails.

They promise to promote your business on their website and promote your award IF and only IF you pay them large amounts of money. These either take the form of regular payments or one off larger payments. Whatever, even if they do, the award is still meaningless because CLUE! no one has heard of it. And forgive me for being Old Mrs Traditionalist, surely an award that you have to PAY for is actually an advert, not an award.

The latest one is "Wildlife Experience of the Year" - of where? The UK? Europe? The World? The known Universe? Don't get me wrong - you have still "won" the made-up award (along with all the other companies they sent the email to). However if you want to publicise your "win" with anything that looks plausible, that's where you have to hand over the cash.

Scam awards are on the rise. Businesses and customers - don't be misled.