When you go on one of our pelagic trips, you can be assured that we will do our best to make it as productive as possible. We will use our many years of experience (which includes understanding the movements of currents) to find the best places to go birding on any particular day.
Generally, on the East Coast, we have to travel a lot farther to reach the edge of the continental shelf (where the real pelagic birds occur) than one has to go off the West Coast. Off North Carolina’s Outer Banks, this means that we usually spend at least two hours running at full cruising speed to reach productive waters. (Note – off Virginia Beach the shelf is even wider and we may run for twice as long.) When we reach a productive area (usually, but not always at the shelf edge) we slow down to a pace at which we can scan for birds. When we spot birds (or cetaceans, or other marine life for that matter) we make an announcement over the boat’s P.A. system to alert folks on deck, and if possible, try to get the boat in a better position to see what has been spotted.
During the winter, we do a lot of chumming which attracts some species (including gulls, gannets, fulmars and Great Skuas) quite close to the boat. During the warmer months, we don’t use nearly as much chum, but we are often chumming, often by dripping fish oil to make a slick and or melting a frozen chum block behind the boat. We’ve found that it doesn’t take a large quantity of chum to make a big difference during the warmer months. Chumming works best on windy days during the spring, summer, and fall and the scent alone might enable us to have a good look at some of the tubenoses here.
We also take note of cetaceans and other marine life during our pelagic birding trips, and may take a few minutes to study some whales or dolphins, but we don’t tend to stay around for a long time waiting for them to resurface, nor do we follow a particular group or animal for long periods of time. Nevertheless, our trips have yielded some very interesting encounters with various cetaceans, and we have been able to document the occurrence of some rare visitors to our waters.
Although the emphasis of our trips is clearly on birds, what we strive for on our trips is a well-rounded experience with all of the offshore wildlife, be it birds, whales, dolphins, fish, sea turtles, or something else.
The weather has a big impact on how we run our trips too. On calm days we might do a bit more riding around and it might be possible to catch up with a bird or a feeding flock of birds for a closer look. On rough days it is often a matter of getting the birds to come closer to us by chumming them in. Our boat, the Stormy Petrel II is very comfortable in a big sea and has good stability on the drift.