A while back in the spring Teresa and myself booked this year's main holiday which was a 15 night cruise from Southampton to the Caribbean including 6 ports of call and flying back to Birmingham from Barbados.
This was a transitional cruise where the ship P & O 'Britannia' was crossing the Atlantic for the Caribbean summer after having spent our summer in Europe.
The weather was not kind for the first few days with windy conditions and a large Atlantic swell so that progress was slow and overnight we had only reached the area around Cornwall and the Scillies.
This however proved quite productive with large numbers of Cory's and Great Shearwaters albeit always at a distance.
As we progressed south past Brittany into the Bay of Biscay the elements worsened and the promenade deck (Level 4) from where I did my seawatching was closed off for a day and a half as it was considered unsafe much to my disappointment.
Early in the cruise I met Tony Chennery from Plymouth who was a member of the ORCA cetacean conservation charity who was onboard carrying out a cetacean survey as well as giving daily presentations on sea days which were very informative and enjoyable.
As we approached Madeira our first stop the sea conditions improved and myself and Tony separately did some birding after docking picking up some terns and Yellow-legged Gulls.
We then faced 6 full days at sea which I was really looking forward to but which actually turned into a bit of a birding and cetacean disaster.
Mid Atlantic was a birding desert with only perhaps the odd bird passing in a whole day but as we we approached the Caribbean things started to improve with sightings of Red-billed Tropicbird, Brown, Red-footed and Masked Boobies.
We stopped at 5 islands starting with Antigua followed by St Kitts, St Lucia, St Vincent and finally Barbados from where we flew back to the UK.
We undertook whale and dolphin spotting trips out of first St Lucia and then St Vincent, St Lucia provided great views of 5 Sperm Whales, a single animal followed by a group of four but no dolphins.
The trip out of St Vincent gave us great views of Bottlenose Dolphins riding the bow wave of the boat but no whales, so all in all we did ok.
Overall a nice holiday but not the best cruise we have been on over the years, here are some photos from the trip.......
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