It rained overnight. Not badly, but the ground was wet and I could hear it at various points through the night.
Which brings us on to the Dingle nightlife. This was a Thursday evening don’t forget. And the nightlife was going on until at least 2:30 am, probably 3. There was a lot of shouting, laughing and general carrying on.
Someone, I presume a guy, went by in his car actually playing a tune with his throttle. He was hitting his accelerator in time to a tune and the car was seriously tuned (not musically) so it was loud. I only heard it once, and it made me chuckle in bed, but there was a lot of stuff going on.
18 vans parked up in the aire overnight. The big Hymer (Dieter) had gone by the time we got up. But we heard later that he’d already taken the 8+ metre van over the Conor Pass.
Future John: That swayed our decision to try it the next day.
Morning Coffee and Muffins
But in the morning we were treated to coffee and muffins. Perhaps they do this to counter the online reviews, but there’s a covered seating area that I guess is also an outside bar for when they have music in the yard. But every morning you can have filter coffee, a muffin and a chat.
Today we met Andrew at coffee. We bumped into Andrew a number of times while we were at this aire. He was from Selby, Yorkshire (worked for British Gas in some sort of offshore capacity, for Scottish and more southerly offshore rigs), very anti-Brexit and generally really easy to talk to. We chatted about routes, places to visit, politics and people over coffee and beer later that evening. Andrew was doing a three-week tour with his dog while his wife worked back at home. He’s retired, she’s not. He was in a converted Transporter, two vans to the right of us in the pictures.
Morning Walk
Well we’ve not had any notifications to tell us our boat trip is cancelled, so we decided to have a slow start (after coffee and chats), have a wander around Dingle again then come back to the van to get wrapped up for the trip at 2.
This is Fungie (see Michael later), the bottlenose dolphin who greeted boats around Dingle Harbour for 37 years after first appearing in 1983. He disappeared in 2020.
It did rain on the way back to the van. As I said yesterday, the weather was supposed to be better in the afternoon, so a bit of rain in the morning was ok.
Dingle Boat Trip
(Apologies now… I’m going to nerd out a bit about camera gear during this outing. Some of you ask me about the camera gear I use, so it’ll be interesting to a few of you. Sorry to the rest)
I was determined to take the big camera on the boat. It’s an R5, so somewhat weather-sealed, and so shouldn’t succumb to the same fate Dad’s Nikon F-601 did when I took it on the Maid of the Mist in 1991. Sorry Dad!
But I wasn’t taking any chances, so took a plastic bag to keep the most of the water off it. The camera may not come out of the bag, but I rarely regret taking the big camera, and often regret not taking it.
We were well togged up even before we got the trip-supplied waterproofs. We didn’t regret the extra layers we applied.
Then we got the waterproofs as well. It appeared we had joined a large group of Scandinavians of some flavour or other – 13 unlucky for some, but we forgot to count the skipper, Declan, so that made 14.
We were doing the Wildlife RIB Adventure tour. (€80pp for 2.5 hours)
Declan was our guide. Not always easy to hear what he was telling us, especially if the motors were running anything over idle.
First stop was some caves in the mainland cliffs. Thunder Cave was named because the echoes from the waves sounded like rolling thunder.
So far, so good. The camera choice was working well.
But then we took to the stretch out to the islands. And we hit some weather.
It rained.
And it felt like we were in a hail storm. The rain was painful on the face. The swell got up too and we were crashing from wave top to wave bottom. And that meant big spray coming over the front… at me… ‘cos I was on the front row of seats.
Which also meant I was struggling to keep the camera dry. The inside of the plastic bag was getting wet and everything was steaming up. The camera was sort of fine with all of this, but keeping the front of the lens clear was a problem. If I’d taken a cloth to clean the lens then it would just have got wet too. So I just tried to wipe the filter on the front of the lens with my hoodie hood. Which worked to a degree.
I keep a UV filter on the front of most of my lenses as a protector. That way if I damage it or spill something on it, then I’ve lost a £50 filter and not a £1000 lens.
The filter was trash after this trip. I’ll need a new filter and will have to run the camera for the rest of the trip with no lens protecting filter. Need to be careful.
The upshot is that the rest of my R5 images are a bit blurred due to the smearing on the lens.
If I wanted a camera trip then I’d have gone on a camera trip. We’d have been on a different boat and there would have been room for camera bags, lenses and cleaning gear. And I’d have been able to set the camera up to get better shots. I knew I wasn’t on a camera trip, so the pictures are snaps of what we saw and a regular trip.
Note to self: bring the battery grip next time! That would have been worth it so I could have used the high-speed shooting without destroying my precious battery level.
Seals on Great Blasket
This is An Trá Bán, the white strand on Great Blasket – a large group of grey seals sheltering from the weather. People who had landed on the island were walking very close behind them on the beach – seals not bothered.
Great Blasket was evacuated in 1953, so there are no permanent residents, though it is still possible to rent a cottage in the summer – with no electricity, Wi-Fi, just the basics.
Cathedral Rock
The Cathedral Rocks of Inis na Bró.
Minke Whales
Then on our way back from the islands a few of us got to spot minke whales a couple of times. We were probably over 100m away, and I didn’t get a shot, but we saw a whale. Nice.
Common Dolphins
A bit further on, we came across a pod of common dolphins. I’ve once before, when I was probably about 10 or 12, seen dolphins in the water. The one I saw before was huge, at least 8 feet, and probably more. But these guys are roughly 5 to 8 feet (1.5 to 2.4 m). But still what a treat to see them.
We were in amongst them for probably about 5 minutes.
At one point we did see one dolphin jump clear out of the water a few metres from the boat. It really looked like it was coming up to have a better look at us.
And this is where the R5 battery ran out. I was keeping things really light, in terms of tech, so just the camera and my trusty 24-240mm lens. No other lenses and no other gear. And that meant no spare battery. I had put a fully charged battery in and was just going to manage it. So I took pictures sparingly, knowing that if we got close to whales or dolphins then I’d want to be a bit snap happy.
I was totally happy with the “keep it simple” approach. We had full wet-weather gear on and a life preserver. Getting at pockets was difficult (I could just about reach my iPhone in a breast pocket). So having another battery would have been tricky, especially opening up the camera to change it etc. Good choice to manage a single battery and put up with limiting the shots I took.
Then it was time to head home. We saw seals, dolphins and whales. Sue was also over the moon to have seen a bunch of birds even without the other wildlife. (Sue was thrilled by the gannets, terns, Manx shearwaters and cormorants, especially when flying alongside the boat)
I didn’t regret taking the big camera. But I do regret not taking the 360. I think I could have got some great shots and video of the dolphins with it on its selfie stick. But then I struggled to manage keeping the R5 dry in its bag, and having something else to deal with would have probably been too much. Next time.
Then we walked home and didn’t pet the donkey.
That night we went for a Guinness or two in the attached Bridge House Pub. There was music playing in the bar. Traditional stuff that was causing a bit of a sing-along. We’re no experts on this sort of stuff, but not great in our opinions.
Got the lowdown on hurling from the barmaid who played the game and set us straight on the rules. It is not the same as shinty – which is played in Scotland. We also played “what’s the US state capital” and had a chat with Andrew – but just as we were going to leave, so didn’t get into full flow.
What a fantastic treat to see whales and dolphins in the wild. We see seals all the time around Cornwall, and in theory should see dolphins and whales, but we haven’t to date.
We did in Dingle.
It was well worth the €80.
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