It has been an adventurous few days, getting to the Canary Islands and meeting up with the team from Song of the Whale. 

After work on Friday, we got an overnight flight to Dublin and waited about 8 hours and got a 4 hour flight to Tenerife in the Canary Islands.  We met 3 of the members of the team at the airport, Claire,  a program assistant from the U.K., Olly, a research scientist from the U.K., and Nienke, a new field assistant from the Netherlands. Together we took a cab to the harbour of Santa Cruz.  After accidentally leaving our international cell phone in the cab during all the excitement (which we hope to get back when we return), we boarded the boat. On the boat that night, we met Richard, our skipper from the U.K., Mat, the engineer from the U.K., Magnus, our second skipper from Sweden, Niklas, field assistant, from Sweden, and Doug, a visiting research scientist from the U.K. After a delicious dinner that Niklas made for us (thereby setting the cooking bar very high), Richard gave us a quick safety briefing (which included how to use the toilets!) and we promptly fell into our beds while the boat set sail for El Hierro.

Beth Allgood and Mayumi Sakoh from IFAW' s Washington DC office will be joining the Song of the Whale team in the Canary Islands on Saturday to learn more about their research and its links to policy work.  They will be reporting back on getting their seal-legs, learning about the work of IFAW’s state-of-the-art marine mammal research vessel, looking for whales, and hopefully having some fun.