Rooms
Tariff and Booking bed breakfast oban
The Location bed breakfast oban
bed breakfast oban Shenavallie Farm Benderloch - holiday accommodation Scotland UK
bed breakfast oban, bed breakfast benderloch, oban holiday, Shenavallie Farm Benderloch - holiday accommodation Scotland UK
We find a few whales, two of which are very small, obviously juvenile, minke whales. There are some hurries of birds in the area, but things seem less lively then they did at the beginning of the month.
At the end of the day, we head for an anchorage on the mountainous Isle of Rhum.
As we pass the northern end of Eigg we are treated to a visit from a group of harbour porpoises. The conditions are just right and enable us to hear and see their blows, something normally invisible.
After the months of searching for porpoises in the Baltic earlier in the summer, this is a wonderful spectacle at the end of a long day.
We wake up at 0700 and take some time to go a shore. Rhum, now owned by Scottish Natural Heritage, is home to a lot of wildlife as well as a grand old mansion that is now a hotel.
Nick is keen to see some deer and sits on a remote hillside to look out for some. He sees none, but from their vantage point below, the rest of the team can see deer further up the hill watching Nick from a distance!
After a quick tour of Rhum we leave and head for one last survey of the waters around Canna and south toward the Island of Coll.
Once we pass from behind the north side of Canna we lose our protection from the moderate seas and decide that the last day of surveying we had hoped for is deteriorating.
When whitecaps become persistent, searching for whales and sharks becomes difficult. Taking good pictures and video gets hard, too. So we set course for Tobermory one last time.
We sail in, passing Ardnamurchan Point and its distinctive lighthouse, the most westerly point of mainland Britain. We pick up a mooring in Tobermory Harbour.
Tomorrow we will haul our dinghy up onto the fore deck in preparation for the return trip through the Caledonian Canal. The Caledonian Canal in Scotland connects the Scottish east coast at Inverness with the west coast at Corpach near Fort William. Caledonian Canal is a sister canal of Göta Canal in Sweden, which was also constructed by Thomas Telford.
The canal runs some 62 miles (100 km) from northeast to southwest. Only one third of the entire length is man-made, the rest being formed by Loch Dochfour, Loch Ness, Loch Oich, and Loch Lochy. These lochs are part of the Great Glen, a geological fault in the Earth's crust. There are 29 locks (including eight at Neptune's Staircase, Banavie), four aqueducts and 10 bridges in the course of the canal.
. Once through the canal we will head south to Ipswich, England, and Fox's Marina where "Song of the Whale" was first launched twenty-two years ago. Here she will be readied for her next voyage into the field.
Our hope is that the data we have collected during the month in Scotland, on the small-scale movements and distributions of individual basking sharks, will contribute valuable new details to the small, but growing pool of information on basking shark biology and natural history.
Basking sharks, although now protected in British waters, still suffer from widespread, cruel hunting practices and uncontrolled trade in their parts in other areas.
We urge countries to help conserve basking sharks at the forthcoming CITES meeting in November 2002 by listing the basking shark on Appendix II, which will impose some controls on fishing and the trade in shark parts.
We want to ensure that the depleted populations of these magnificent, little known, and elusive creatures around the world are allowed the chance to recover. This shark is called the basking shark because it is most often observed when feeding at the surface and appears to be basking in the warmer water there. It is the only member of the family Cetorhinidae. Gunnerus was the first to describe and name the species Cetorhinus maximus from a specimen found in Norway.