06 August : at sea in the Strait of Gibraltar

At last, a new entry you may rightly say. In excuse, I must give family problems as one major part, another the fact that we are in the hot season (although I really should get out and see some wader passage now) and I am very busy drawing and writing for a book which will be handed in about 10 months late if I can maintain the present rate of progress.
However, I should also add that there aren't going to be too many blogs between now and mid October at the earliest as for reasons totally beyond my control I had to reschedule the cataract surgery on both which was going to be in early July and will now be in the second part of September, so bang goes another month out, which is why I'm bashing on with the writing and dzrawing (which I actually finished last night). On the plus side, I should be able to see a hell of a lot better after it!
Last Wednesday we went down to Tarifa for a 3 hour trip out with Turmares to try and see some cetaceans, especially the Orcas or Killer Whales which have been seen intermittently. In that we were unlucky, in fact neither did we see Sperm or any other whales, but we did get in amongst a big pod of some 200 (guesstimate) Striped Dolphins, many with small youngBottle-nosed and finally a few Pilot Whales (which are more closely related to dolphins).

In the bird line things were equally bad, if not downright poor. We saw at least 3 Black Kites crossing towards Tangiers, 4 or 5 Cory's Shearwaters but no Balearic Shearwaters, which rather surprised me; the odd Yellow-legged Gull crossing between continents and that was it. No masses of Black Kites, no huge spiralling flocks of White Storks, in fact, a lot of nothing. So you'll just have to make do with these photographs!