The night shift started with the transit to East of Celtic Deep where we arrived around 6am. At this site the plan is to get full multibeam coverage of the seabed before beginning to pick up grab samples, and so after deploying the CTD we then started the multibeam lines at around 7am. There isn't as much for us all to do when the multibeam is running and so the morning had passed fairly slowly for the first couple of hours until Graham on deck alerted us to dolphins that had appeared on the starboard side of the ship. We all rushed down and over the next 10 minutes they just kept on appearing from all directions until we were surrounded by about 200 common dolphins all surfing the waves.
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| Some of the 200 or so common dolphins that were surfing the waves around the vessel |
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| Caught mid-flight |
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| A gannet following the action from above |
Unfortunately the occurrence of all the dolphins started interfering with the multibeam as you can see from the interruptions on the multibeam image below and so we are now going to have to re-run the multibeam line.
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| Interference on the multibeam image from the dolphins |
