Snorkelling with puffins at Skomer Island

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So, as you might have found through some of these chats here in these stories I’m sharing, I do love puffins. They’re one of my favourite birds. And when I stumbled on the fact that you would be able to snorkel with puffins, I knew this was something I had to to do. And so we booked a whole trip around heading to Pembrokeshire, to head out with Celtic Deep, a lovely company who have nature conservation really woven into their trips.

And, we went to Skomer Island and we snorkelled with the puffins. And so the fun, fun thing about this trip is that in order to have meaningful interactions with the puffins and ones that they lead, you need to be approachable. But if you don’t look like a puffin, you aren’t very approachable. So you get issued, life sized, beautifully hand-painted, and created puffins.

That you can either have in the water, and sort of move around your hand, or they say if you’re if you’re a photographer, you’ve got a big camera. I’m pretty sure this is a laugh, but no it’s not, it did genuinely work, they have, like a puffin hat that you can put on. So the other thing that’s important when you’re, you’re using these things is that it looks and moves like a puffin.

And then if you get to a point where you’re about 20 metres away, that’s when you would stop actively swimming towards the puffins, and then you would allow them to make the encounter from there if they’re going to so there’s no swimming at them, because if you do, you’re just going to disturb them and not fly away. And that’s not very helpful or healthy behaviour for them.

So you wait and then gradually, if you’ve got this puffin on your head, you’re fake puffin and you’re sort of like shaking your head around and nodding up, down and that kind of thing. They start to think that you are a puffin and they all come over. And so it was just so cool to see the fact, well, I mean, I got to live out my ultimate dream clearly, didn’t I? I got to be a puffin for a day, essentially.

But it was so amazing to just see the fact that if you communicate in a way and behave in a way that speaks to them, you get to have interactions that are close, and feel really authentic because you are then in the water, watching them do puffin things while you also pretend to do puffin things and so it was just one of the most amazing experiences, and I would love to experience doing that again someday.