 After Falmouth on the 20th September, we received no more sightings reports of Dony from Cornwall. The weather changed, there were less people around and there was perhaps a feeling of the end of the holiday season as September drew to a close... which may or may not have had anything to do with it!
Anyway, our hopes of a return to Ireland were not to be, as we have now received a report from the island of Ouessant off the Finistere coast (Brittany, France). Olivier Petri was crossing back to the mainland on the hydrofoil when he was delighted to see a dolphin playing around the boat in the harbour at Stiff during boarding. This ferry is too fast even for a dolphin to follow, so it was a short encounter, but Olivier managed to take some pictures which are good enough for me to be 90% sure it is Dony. The damage to the front edge of the dorsal fin is in exactly the same place and the profile of the rear edge, whilst not clear, is consistent with Dony's. Unfortunately we don't have any precise behavioural clues as there was no-one in the water at the time, understandably with a high speed ferry about to take off! However, the facts that Ouessant, and the harbour at Stiff in particular, has been the location for many previous Dony sightings, and that the only other likely candidate in terms of dolphins who seek out interactions with boats and people, Jean Floc'h, has never been known to come here, clinches the identification for me.
|
