August 2017

The weather has been on our side.

The second part of the Greenland Halibut fishing season has started and Iolaire is out sailing again. Dr Jonathan Gordon is leading the field work and the team consists of Fred Lehto, Johnny Leo Johansen, Juho Reinikainen, Linda Massa and Tuomas Salonen.

 

S/Y Iolaire crewmembers for the August 2017 season, Juho Reinikainen, Tuomas Salonen and Linda Massa.

The entire June and July has been  a bit unusual in terms of sperm whales, with all whales moving to offshore waters (more than 20 nautical miles) on several occasions and whales have been hard to find for whale-watchers. We are looking into the underlying factors to this but do not have any answers yet. We were really curious to find out how things would be when the fishing started – would the whales be around?

The team in search of Spermwhales.

 

 It turned out that we were lucky, both with great weather and with several sperm whales around. We have now an acoustic recording of a sperm whale interacting with a longline, which was one of the main goals for this years field work – so we are more than thrilled! We hope ofcourse to get more recordings and feel optimistic since the weather forecast and whales seem to be on our side.

The work at sea consists to a large extent of watchkeeping, taking ID photos and listening to the whales.

We will be updating the blog every now and then as we are not always in the range of network, so bear with us. As we are a non-profit organisation, we would like to remind you of the possibility to donate to the research on this site (see the donate button), every little bit helps. Stay tuned and keep on pushing