Whitesands Bay to Abersoch: the dolphinarium

Saturday was a really long day, but I had the most amazing sighting of dolphins in Cardigan Bay. These Cardigan Bay dolphins are much bigger than the Bristol Channel ones. They are either a different species or the BC ones are actually some other form of cetacean. There were maybe 20 dolphins in each of the schools that I came across. The amazing thing was that there were some really athletic ones there jumping clean out of the water. One jumped right across the bows of Cervisia, just a few metres in front of us. He obviously timed that one really well. It is quite difficult to understand why they do this. It is also quite difficult to understand why they choose to swim with boats. They clearly know that a boat is something that they want to engage with. Maybe it relieves the boredom of swimming around catching fish all day. The other strange thing about the dolphins is how they come up for air or jump out of the water together. They must be swimming together down there. There must also be some sort of decision process going on where they decide to jump out of the water together rather than to just come up for air.
I weighed anchor at 7am in order to be able to catch the tide going round St. David's Head. It was pretty grey and murky when we rounded the headland, but there was a good little wind. Unfortunately the wind was from the north north east: exactly the direction I wanted to go in. This meant that I was going to have to tack. I sailed offshore for an hour or so and then tacked to follow the welsh coast all the way up. I had the wind vane self steering on and Cervisia then just followed the best course to windward: this course was parallel to the coast.
It turned into a long sail. I thought about going into Aberystwyth but this would have meant going into a port in an onshore wind (which can be nasty as the waves can break on entry into the port). I would also have not been able to leave that early the next day. I thus carried on northwards into the night.
I had a nice sunset accompanied by the dolphins and then sailed under a starry night with the odd shooting star. The wind died a bit and I was tacking slowly towards Abersoch on the Lleyn peninsula. I motored the last 10 miles as it was getting time for bed! At 0230 I dropped the anchor, set the anchor watch on the iPad, set the alarm clock for 7am and slept.
I covered 92 miles today in a 20 hour day. It was quite a long day!