Posts

Showing posts with the label puffins

Ten days on Zuza - 12th June - we circumnavigate the island

Image
 When we woke the next morning we found ourselves surrounded by a thick fog. The little yacht was still anchored up in the bay but now we had a really big ship on the shoreline, which must have been the one expected at 3.00am. It appeared to be off loading equipment for the base. We had a leisurely breakfast, staring anxiously at the weather, and finally, around lunchtime when it had started to lift a little, the skipper, Neil made the decision to take Zuza out and circumnavigate Hirta. We did this in an anticlockwise direction so that we first sailed out along the eastern side of Dùn, an island which is only just cut off from Hirta. It all looked very mysterious in the mist. The division between Dùn and Hirta St Kilda houses the largest puffin colony in Europe and Dùn is one of the places where they nest. We could see many bobbing about on the ocean and could glimpse through the fog their burrows in the grassy flanks of the cliffs.  Unfortunately as soon as they saw us they would dive