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CalendarBoat: M.V. Argonaut, skippered by Ray Horsfield
CONDITIONS Very little breeze whatsoever for the majority of the day, with a slight south-west push that was barely discernible and didn’t create any sea state at all By late afternoon the north-easterly had gotten up to around 15 knots but we were well beyond half way back to port by the time that had happened. We commenced our drift at -32.928251 / 152.5960554 and with no activity we decided to head back to the spot where we had seen a Sooty Tern and some feeding dolphins (-32.918514 / 152.5838517) before finishing our drift early to return, searching for inshore activity (which did not transpire). Sea surface temperate was taken and was at 20.1 at our drift commencement and a degree warmer at the place we’d seen the Sooty Tern.
Sooty Tern
ACTIVITY Departed wharf at 7:11am returning at 4:34pm. Activity? It’s tempting to say “nil”. This was easily the quietest pelagic I have ever been on, let alone organised. Over the course of the entire day the only bird that came into the boat was a single Silver Gull. Virtually all of the tubenoses we saw were migrating birds; hardly a bird seen foraging at all through the day. There was a lot of floating objects in deep water and the colour of the water was not the usual rich cobalt blue. What part this played in the day’s proceedings is not known, but worth noting. Perhaps the biggest surprise wasn’t so much the lack of interest in the boat or lack of activity out wide (no birds added to the list at the shelf), but the complete lack of inshore shearwater flocks. This was the first Port Stephens trip that saw no shearwaters (apart from the odd marauding bird) on the homeward leg (keeping mind that many tens of thousands of birds breed on the islands we pass).
Jelly Fish
BIRDS 8 species were recorded outside the heads; a very poor day. The day was made even poorer by the fact that only 3 species of ‘brown shearwaters’ made up the entirety of tubenose seabirds for the whole day – something completely unprecedented in my experience. Only highlight was a very distant Sooty Tern that could only be identified by zooming right into some digital photos obtained.
Taxonomy follows the BirdLife Australia Working List V2.1.
Wedge-tailed Shearwater: 80 (25). All lone marauding birds except for a flock of ~25 birds at the shelf, likely flushed by the boat off the water.
Short-tailed Shearwater: 100 (30). All migrating.
Sooty Shearwater: 40 (10). Singles and some loose flocks of to 10 individuals seen and photographed, all migrating south. Good numbers for these trips.
Australasian Gannet: 7 (2). Mostly adult birds.
Pomarine Jaeger: 2 (1). One bird feigned to follow the boat, the other flying away (about an hour apart).
Crested Tern: 3 (1). Possibly our lowest count of these as well.
Sooty Tern: 1. A bird was picked up flying above the water at quite some distance from the boat. As we couldn't identify it we stopped the boat and images were obtained, confirming it as an adult Sooty Tern.
Silver Gull: 4 (1). Including our one and only ‘customer’.
MAMMALS:
Indo-Pacific Common Dolphin: - a single pod of ~10 on the way out.
Offshore Bottlenose Dolphin: – several pods seen, mostly within 5 miles of the shelf (<50 individuals)
Humpback Whale: 4 – Two singletons + one sighting of two individuals.
FISH
One quite large flying fish about 10 miles from the heads on the return leg. At the shelf, a tall fin was observed. One person thought it was so tall that it was ‘floppy’ (suggesting a Sunfish), whilst another person thought there was a second fin (i.e. a dorsal + tail fin) so we never got close to an identification on this creature.
OTHER
A purple-tinged ‘box jellyfish’ with small fish sheltering beneath it was photographed at the shelf.