Watch the Birdie.

Today had been carefully planned – six months ago when we first booked the holiday – new moon and low tide. Although it is new moon in two days time, this is close enough to the best time for dolphin spotting in a firth and the best place on the best firth is Chanonry Point. There is no magic about it, there is a channel just off the Point and at full and new moons the tides are both the highest and the lowest as the Sun, Moon and Earth are in alignment. At low tide the fish are confined to the narrow channel, so the lower it is the better. Nothing is guaranteed, but with a population of 800 dolphins in the Moray Firth, the statistics should be fairly reliable.

We had woken up to snow in the morning, not a good sign, but it would be another year before we had another chance so we decided to go for it. The plan was to leave the B&B at 3:30 pm to arrive at 5:40 for low tide; the books do say that it’s the two hours that follow which are important. When we left the B&B it had been snowing hard for several hours and had started to settle but had stopped by the time we had travelled five miles and then the sun shone until shortly before we arrived.

As we arrived, we spotted a lady just about to give up and go home so started pumping her for advice born out of years of experience.
“It’s too late now, they won’t be coming.”
“But from what I’ve read they should soon arrive.”
“They don’t read the books.”
One popped its head up and she unpacked her kit again.

Her advice was that we should stand well back from the water with a modest length of lens; I quickly decided to opt for the opposite extremes and got as close to the action as possible with my most extreme lens. The next lesson was to watch the birdie, it obviously knew exactly what was going on, which combined with looking for shadows beneath the surface, gave good guidance where to point the camera. There is an art to using both eyes, one looking through the viewfinder, the other looking directly at the scene; I’ll be working on that for next year.

The big problem was, as quickly as I was realising how to capture the subject, the filling bladder combined with the slowly freezing body in general and fingers in particular were robbing me of the will to live. Next year’s holiday will be during a warmer season of the year. As we left, the experienced lady was still after the killer shot but the light was failing as a blizzard had started to blow in; the return journey was slow but uneventful until the last few hundred yards up to the B&B was an erratic slither. Mrs TD was grateful that I had elected to ignore the sat/nav and stick to the main roads for as long as possible.

It was interesting to note that the dolphins were often seen in pairs or trios, and less often though still fairly frequently in fours; we would guess that there were others underneath that we couldn’t see and that they were working in packs.

So, what had we achieved? I had 150 exposures that were binned as soon as we got back except for the Blip illustrating the gull/dolphin relationship; we have experience to draw upon next time; and we have actually seen our first wild dolphins.

The extra of the garden pond was taken just before we set out.