Road to the isles, 2nd July, a harst and a half in Staffa

Following our one warm day on Mull, the morning dawned in a thick mist. As we departed the quay in the Iolaire, the boat we had booked with Staffa Trips, the skipper pronounced that it 'was always like this after a warm day'. He could have said that when we booked the excursion!
The boat was a nice wooden one, mainly open with plenty of room for Hettie the dog to curl up under the seats. The crew were also very helpful and gave a running commentary on the sea life we could see through the murk. Below are some eider ducks on a small rock, cormorants on a large rock and a young seal who was just shedding his baby fur.

We could see small islands appearing out of the mist, a bit later some guillemots and finally a couple of flying puffins told us we were getting close to Staffa.

We motored on until Staffa became visible and finally docked. I suppose it may have been more exciting approaching it in the fog as we were almost on top of it before we could see it. 

The skipper's mate had offered to take us to the place where we could see some puffins. As I had never seen puffins before this was definitely my option, rather than joining the queues shuffling round to Fingal's cave. Alan nobly carried Hettie up the iron stairs to start our walk and set her down at the top. She would never have made it across the rocks to the cave anyway.

Fingal's cave can just be seen in the third photo down, McKinnon's cave in the second picture down. Below that you can see the construction of the basalt rocks, almost like a child's set of bricks.

I stopped briefly on our traverse across the cliff to put the 70-200mm lens and a 1.7 times teleconverter on my camera, little knowing that we would almost be falling over the puffins. The mate from the boat, Davey I think he was called, used to work with Greenpeace and was passionate about the wildlife. He told us that the puffins can be seen here in the day as there are plenty of humans around which keep skuas and other predators away. Otherwise they would be out at sea or deep in their burrows. You must now forgive one shag and an inordinate number of puffin pictures, not a sand eel amongst them though, as the eggs had not yet hatched.

Everyone can now say "Aaahh" because they are appealing and look at you in a very frank manner. I particularly liked the ones kissing!

We stayed too long watching them and by the time we got back down to the boat most of our fellow travellers were returning from the cave.  Alan was determined not to miss out and ran round for a brief look, tracking his way on the slippery rocks a little lower than the normal path to get passed the crowds from another boat, tenuously groping their way along. I stayed on the jetty with Hettie.

The Iolaire moved away and we had an uneventful although wet trip back to Fionnphort passing a cloud shrouded Iona.