Following on from Sarah's blog - at about 9am in a force 8 gale, the shout went up that there was a dead dolphin in the water. This time it had been an eagle-eyed local journalist onboard who'd spotted the animal. Ironically this morning was the first time she'd seen live dolphins in the wild, as they exuberantly jumped high above the stormy waves around the bow of the ship.

But now we had a problem. The weather was too bad to launch a Rigid Inflatable Boat to retrieve the animal. But we know how important it is to take this sort of 'fresh' evidence back to shore.

The crew went to work, struggling for almost an hour with various combinations of ropes to try and secure the body. Eventually they managed, in an Herculean effort, to get the body on deck. Then it was laid out on the heli-deck so that measurements could be recorded.

The beautiful markings are even more intricate up close, but death makes the colours much less vivid. And blood from around the dolphin's eye was such a startling colour of red against the paling markings.

The body looked very freshly dead, and some telltale markings of cuts and scrapes to fins suggest what we all expect - that it is a casualty of a fishing net.

Spotting LIVE dolphins in rough weather is not easy, they must be close to the ship. Spotting dead dolphins is NEVER easy, even in good weather they have to be very close to the ship... which makes us wonder how many float by unseen in the whitecapped waves.

Even now there are still dolphins playing alongside the ship.

Willie, Campaigner

Too bad that you encountered that dead dolphin - an other piece of evidence that non-selective fishing gear is also threatening marine mammals, not only unwanted fish.

This dolphin with its markings of cuts and scrapes to fins should be handled right into the main office of the French minister for agriculture and fisheries, as most pelagic trawlers chasing bass now in the Channel are from France.