Over the last month I have been very lucky to join members of the Orkney Islands Sea Angling Association and their boat ‘Welcome Home’ during a couple of competition trips. On both trips, we left the harbour in Stromness early in the morning, with the sun shining, and headed out of Scapa Flow towards the west, with amazing views over Graemsay and Hoy.
We stopped at various locations to fish, all located west of Orkney, in an area close to where two of the seals that we tagged earlier in the year have been on their trips.
Once the competition had ended, Roy and the rest of the crew got onto cleaning the fish that had been caught. Each fish was measured, to estimate its weight later on, the species noted down, and the guts from each fish were stored in plastic bags. Once back at SMRU, these stomach samples will be analyzed for prey quality. Also, the list of species caught, which for both trips included ling, cod, haddock and torsk, gives us an idea of which fish species are available to the seals in different locations around Orkney.
The trip also offered a great opportunity to observe several species of seabirds, including great and arctic skuas, fulmars, great black-backed gulls, puffins, guillemots and razorbills. And we even saw a harbour porpoise! The fulmars, despite their smaller size, seemed to keep the great skuas in place when bits of bait or fish were thrown into the water.
I love the tracking map of where seals cruise around, a good insight into there behaviour