Corryvreckan

For a long time I have had a standing invitation to go out with David and Jean Ainslie on one of the wildlife boat trips that their company Sealife Adventures runs from Seil.

Finally Cathleen and I went today and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.  We not only saw porpoises (briefly), sea eagles (quite close) , lots of seals, feral goats, deer, gannets, terns and a host of other living things but we also went through the Sound of Corryvreckan , which lies between Sarba and Jura and through the  Corryvreckan itself.

The whirlpool is , apparently, the third largest in the world and the sea in the whole sound was fascinating, running, it seemed, in all directions at once.   The ride was also quite bumpy at times thought nothing extreme and the powerful boat was handled wonderfully well by David. .  

The cause of the phenomenon is a combination of tide, wave action and the topography of the sea bed , on which there is a very high pinnacle over which we passed several times so that David could show us it on the sonar.

My picture is of another of the local boats that go out on these trips and I caught it just as it accelerated to go through the whirlpool.  

I have posted some additional pictures from the trip on my Flilckr site, including as a close a picture of the young sea eagle as I could get and a sonar picture of the pinnacle.   

All in all the trip was very much worth having and we were grateful to David & Jean for the opportunity to have a second outing on the water in just four days.