From the Ullapool to Stornoway Ferry

No visit to Ullapool is complete without a day trip on the ferry to Stornoway and back. It's not as good a dedicated whale watching trip, but at £20 a head as a foot passenger it's a lot cheaper and offers the chance of seeing a few decent cetaceans and seabirds. Today I caught the 10:30am ferry from Ullapool, we arrived at Stornoway at 1pm and left at 2pm, back in Ullapool for 4:45pm. If you want to go ashore you've hardly got time to get past the ferry car park at Stornoway before you need to be back on the boat but then that's not what I was here for. I was here for the boat journey.

The plan is pretty much the same as on the whale watching trip, look out for large groups of sea birds feeding and if you find one you may well have hit the jackpot. The only problem is the ferry just ploughs on, sticking to it's set course and speed and doesn't really care too much about what you have seen. It's not going to stop to let you have a closer look, you have to rely on birds and cetaceans being close enough and obliging enough for you to get a decent look at them. 

The photo above is looking south from the ferry towards Skye, you can even make out the Old Man of Storr and in the foreground you can see a flock of gannets feeding. A couple of minutes scanning through these and a minke whale revealed itself briefly about four times. Not a great view but decent enough to get a positive identification.

Minke whale.

We also came across a distant pod of common dolphins which were very energetic with many leaps clean out of the water. Again the ferry just keeps going until the dolphins are lost to view. This pod plus a few other scattered individuals which we saw during the journey numbered about 22 individuals.

Decent numbers of harbour porpoise today as well, about 20 in total with 10 each around the Summer Isles and Stornoway harbour.

Four species of skua today, a juvenile long-tailed, two pomarines, one arctic and many bonxies.

Two sooty shearwaters went past on the return journey but strangely not a single Manxie. I thought about asking the captain to stop the boat so I could get a better photo but decided against it. There were also about 20 storm petrels including one little group of eight flying together.

The Minch. Perfect for cetacean watching but probably too calm for big numbers of sea birds.

So that's the end of my week long tour of northern Scotland, at least as far as sea watching is concerned. In the end I saw 3 - 5 minke whales, around 40 common dolphins, 20 bottle-nosed dolphins and 20 harbour porpoise. Of course I always hope for something new, but the reality is that it's hard enough seeing the common stuff because "there's a whole lot of nothing out there".

Ullapool and Loch Broom.

Stornoway.

Suilven.