t's three bells into the afternoon watch or so it would be if Puffin had a real ship's clock. Puffin's running up the coast to Charleston, accompanied by friends on the sloop, Civil Twilight, pictured above. It's bright and sunny but the wind isn't enough for a 47 foot sloop to sail by though her main is up to steady the roll as moderate swells sweep by us from east to west. The seas are lumpy with 3-5 foot swells, looking like so many squirrels under a blanket.

We called Civil Twilight to ask about the birds we see that seem like large gulls. Gerri tells us they are (northern) gannets. According to Sibley's, these are large birds with a wingspan nearly a large as the brown pelican. They seem more agile then the pelicans as they wheel and dive from as much as 20 or 30 feet in the air. They dive deeper than pelicans and have air sacs in their shoulders to cushion the impact of hitting the water (as do the brown pelicans). They're more skittish than the shorebirds along the ICW so it's hard to get a good picture. Intermittently a few terns spiral down to skim the surface for a snack, but it's mostly loose groups of gannets we see during the day.

One brown pelican and couple of laughing gulls swing by but we're a little far out for gulls and others who prefer the shallows.

Later an Atlantic spotted dolphin surfaces briefly but didn't lope along Puffin's bow wave as we'd hoped. Later in the afternoon Civil Twilight reported a dozen or more dolphins, several turtles and even a group of rays. Over the years that the our two vessels have had occasion to cruise together, they've consistently reported more frequent and better sightings of nature's nautical creatures - a nettlesome matter that we're sometimes reminded of.