Our First Dolphins!

All this week Tom and I have been getting our research assistant training. We have sat through many lectures on what Sea Watch does, photo ID, boat surveys and land watches. On Wednesday night we tagged along on an evening land watch to check it out and got to see a curious gray seal quite close to the pier, but no dolphins. Yesterday we learned about database entry and had a talk from the Wales stranding coordinator. It was pretty graphic with lots of pictures of dead porpoises and other whales. They do postmortems on the porpoises in this area because the dolphins are killing them for no apparent reason(possibly food scarcity). The bodies wash up full of punctures and teeth rake marks, as well as lots of hemorrhaging from the dolphins ramming them. Any ways, the guy said that we could come to London and see a post mortem during the season, so we are all looking forward to that!
Today on our way to the office we decided to pass by the pier to see if we could see any whales because the girls said they had seen three on the 7-9am land watch. Sure enough we saw 2 dolphins feeding. One of them was no more than 15m away from us! We watched for abit, but we had training at 10:30 so we headed up to the office. Once there Gemma, the sightings coordinator, mentioned that we should go practice photo ID since the animals were still there. That was all it took so we were off running back down to the pier with the office camera. We got some good shots and were able to identify the dolphin as a female named Chris who lost a calf last year.
Unfortunately the photos were on the office camera so I have nothing to post, but tomorrow I am shadowing land watches so hopefully some pictures then. It's supposed to be sunny so that should be nice. If the wind cooperates then we will hopefully go out on a boat on Sunday!