Daily Trip 29 March 2018

Guide Summary and Photographs

A wonderful day of sightings today. Our first came when we came across multiple Bryde’s Whale spouts just outside the harbour. In pursuit of these massive creatures, we happened to stumble across the smallest of our marine big 5, the African Penguin. This was a very large raft of bird indeed, around 50 individuals that also allowed to come very close to them, allowing for some excellent photographs. It is so rare to see rafts this big as our current penguin population is around 2000 individuals. We then left the birds behind, chasing down the whales that we saw before. We managed to keep close to one individual for a while, offering some great angles, but it soon grew bored of us and moved on. As we past the houses at Franskraal, we came across a large seal feeding on an octopus, the seal was flinging the mollusc around while munching on it. We watch in awe as the seal finished its meal.

A quick trip back through the shallows and we were at our sister company at shark cage diving site where a large shark began to circle our vessel. The shark then disappeared and tried to ambush the bait line. With an amazing sighting of the shark we moved on to the Island system. Just at the mouth of shark alley, we spotted a huge number of Southern and Giant Petrels feeding on dead seal pups. It was so special to see this many birds together and was have only seen it before on a handful of occasions. We then entered the infamous Shark Alley and said G’day to our 60,000-strong seal colony. The seals are always entertaining and we hardly wanted to leave them behind.  Our journey continued behind the island and back towards the harbour, where the same African penguin raft was spotted once more and also another very curious Bryde’s Whale giving us one last goodbye. An excellent day at sea and some amazing animals too.

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