This morning we have two members of the GBR Women’s Olympic Curling Team coming aboard to help us raise awareness of our campaign. It is hard to tell who is more excited; us, to see the gold medals, or Debbie and Janice to see minke whales and porpoises. We are rewarded by being allowed to take our pictures with the gold medals. The Olympians are rewarded with a breaching minke whale.

The minke was seen on the horizon just by the entrance to Arisaig harbour. It breached several times in succession. Breaching is a behaviour common in several species of cetacean, such as the humpback whale (as well as the basking shark). Breaching may have several possible functions including parasite removal, communication, and fun. Nick Tregenza has built an underwater viewer from scrap building materials at Russell’s recently renovated house.

Once we find some minke whales, Nick and Russell quickly disembark Song of the Whale to the zodiac, where faecal collection gear is at the ready. The people onboard Song of the Whale radio the zodiac to direct them to the whales. With the underwater viewer, they get lots of close looks at "fluke prints," the slick created by the upward stroke of the whale's tail as it dives. Other large whales, such as sperm whales, defecate during their terminal sounding. We are hoping that minke whales do the same. The terminal sounding is the last breath whales take before diving for prolonged periods. Unfortunately, we don’t find any minke faeces today, even with the help of the viewer. We are down to five people today as Russell has gone home again to catch up on office work.

The sea is like a mill pond, and in no time at all we are spotting minke whales feeding and traveling. We are too few people to use the zodiac "rapid response unit" today, but Alison Gill (a visiting scientist and minke whale enthusiast) takes lots of samples of the fish scales, which can be seen floating in the water once the "hurry" has finished. She hopes to be able to use these to establish the prey species of the birds and whales seen feeding in the hurries. As the weather is so good, we follow up a report that basking sharks have been sighted off the south coast of the Isle of Muck. Sure enough, we soon find three sharks, one of which has a very distinctive nick in the front edge of its caudal (The caudal fin is the tail fin, located at the end of the caudal peduncle. types of caudal fin : (A) - Heterocercal, (B) - Protocercal, (C) - Homocercal, (D) - Diphycercal) fin.

In addition to video range-tracking, we also make sure we have good photo ID pictures of these three sharks in order to find out whether we have seen the same individuals before off Canna, where we were working previously. A cool, crisp and windless autumn morning dawns and Song of the Whale takes advantage of it by setting course for the small outlying island of Hyskeir to investigate the presence of sharks in the area we had found them the week before last. It is generally thought that the basking sharks leave the coastal waters around Britain by late September, so we are interested to see if there are still sharks in the area. Where they spend the winter is still unknown. Soon after we begin our search of the bank south of Hyskeir, we find three sharks. Like yesterday, photo ID is a priority. As well as identification, we also aim to get accurate length estimates for the sharks. This can be done from the photographs, which need to contain three useful pieces of information: the horizon, the nose or tail, and the dorsal fin of the shark.