North Devon Surf School Helps With Porpoise Survey

Surf School helps track down South West’s Cetaceans

The UK’s first British Surfing Association Level 4 approved surf school has signed up to help listen out for porpoises off the north Devon Coast.

Surf South West, based in Croyde, has teamed up with the Devon Wildlife Trust (DWT) to monitor populations of cetaceans to help the charity to gather information about porpoise and dolphin behaviour in the area and compare it with recorded sightings to help to build a better picture of their numbers and habits in north Devon waters.

The project utilises a device called a T-Pod (Timing Porpoise Detector) which scans and records sounds made by cetaceans from a number of locations off the north Devon coast.

Darren Burrett, Managing Director of Surf South West said: ‘Surf South West has recently become a corporate supporter of Devon Wildlife Trust and our contribution to DWT will be directly assisting funding of this project.”

Surf South West is committed to reducing its carbon footprint, acting in a sustainable way and encouraging others to act similarly. They already include information on the local wildlife and environment as part of their surf lessons and are currently awaiting accreditation from the Green Tourism Business Scheme.

DWT’s Corporate Relations Officer Cat Loudwill said: ‘It is great to have direct support for this exciting project which has been revealing interesting results over the past few years. We hope we will now be able to continue to find out exactly where porpoises spend their time in seas around north Devon. In turn, this will help us help direct our future conservation effort.”

Darren Burrett recently joined staff from DWT on one of the fishing boats to observe the retrieval of the T-Pods in order that the data can be collected and assessed. Despite heavy seas, both T-Pods were successfully recovered and the data will be analysed and the results published in due course.

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