Real Staithes

Wed 4th Jun, 2014

Yorkshire Coast Nature has teamed up Real Staithes to offer a great Yorkshire wildlife-watching experience! Read their story below.

Real Staithes is a small family-run enterprise which was born out of our passion for the sea, our coastal environment and the distinctivevillage to which we belong. We started offering our courses in the summer of 2009 under the ‘Real Staithes’ banner; however, Sean started fishing, full-time, out of Staithes in 1973. He got his first boat, a coble, two years later: it was the first ‘All My Sons’. The present day and fourth ‘All My Sons’ is a more modern boat but in an old- fashioned style.

You can listen to Sean talking about tides and seasons with Kevin Rushby here. You can listen to and watch him talking about fishing, foraging and wildlife off the North Yorkshire coast here.These two clips not only show that the North Sea is teeming with wildlife but that the seasons and tides all play their part too.

The knowledge of what you can expect to see where and when is all so entrenched in Sean, from his long hours spent at sea both here in the North Sea and further afield with first his VSO work and later as a Fisheries Consultant. A good example is the Minke Whales that Sean regularly spots in the same quadrant when the feeding conditions are right for them. This blog post about a day at sea in July 2013 mentions eight different sea birds as well as Minke Whales and porpoises.

Minke Whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) are members of the baleen whale family. Despite growing to up to 9,000 kg in weight and 10m in length they are the smallest of the ‘great whales’. They feed on crustaceans, plankton or small schooling fish, for example Herring and Mackerel, which is why they are here during May / June and later in the year for the main Herring season in August / September. The Herring stocks have now improved to vast proportions and so too has the wildlife that depends on them, making the North Sea and especially our area a hot spot for whales, dolphin and porpoises. Last year we spotted five different types of whale - Sia, Humpbacked, Pilot and Fin as well as the Minke Whales. We also regularly spotted Bottlenosed and White-sided Dolphins.

Minke Whales are one of the easier whales to spot as they are often active at the surface. You can see them ‘breaching’ (leaping out of the sea) and ‘spy-hopping’ (raising their heads vertically out of the sea).

Balaenoptera acutorostrata translates to ‘winged whale’ and ‘sharp snout’;however they supposedly received their common name of ‘Minke’ from a Norwegian novice whale-spotter named ‘Meincke’, who mistook a Minke Whale for a Blue Whale…!

The late afternoon trips out to sea aboard ‘All My Sons’ together with Yorkshire Coast Nature offer a great combination of Sean’s local knowledge and Richard and Steve’s expertise.

Real Staithes for fossils, fish, foraging and fun, with a lobster lunch too… for more information please have a look at our website realstaithes.com or call Sean Baxter on 01947 840278.