Pelican of London toured three beautiful(ly interesting) parts of the British Isles this week with a crew of seasoned seafarers on board, including Neil, John and Gaz of the Kimber’s Men!
Apart from the joy of music and banter on board, we enjoyed setting sail on a voyage that took us from Barrow to Douglas in the Isle of Man and on to the bay of Llandudno in north Wales before heading to our final destination in Liverpool.
Along the way, we had fabulous weather and some good sailing conditions, which meant we were worked hard by the professional crew (but not as hard as the example they set).
We searched the sea for marine mammals while underway and found little to report to the Sea Watch Foundation: A 2 hour transect survey with no sightings and one seal in LLandudno Bay.
We scoured Douglas Beach for mermaid’s purses and found four egg cases of Thornback Rays, which were identified and recorded with the Shark Trust app.
In the air, black guillemot, puffins and razorbills told us auks are active in this sea area, as were occasional gannets, gulls and cormorants. One exhausted racing pigeon briefly rested on the course yard before carrying on (it didn’t hang around for biscuit crumbs).
The plankton net drawn through the water near the Isle of Man revealed a developing bloom of diatoms – microscopic algae that form the base of the marine food web. Among the many centric and chain forming diatoms were larvae of molluscs and and naupli of barnacles and copepods, as well as adult copepods of different sizes. However, a highly active appendicularia (pelagic tunicate) and ‘cuddly’ looking Polychaeta worm larvae stole the show.
We’ll use the plankton collected as a prototype dataset for a creating a new feature on the Pelican of London website – watch this space: Pelican of London/Science.
All images (c) C Braungardt 2025
Challenging Habitat 