Pádraig Hooley

This time of the year, they're in feeding.

And, you know, I was just looking at the statistics.

We've had almost 200 sizing reports from, say, Hookhead and Wexford all along the south coast, the west coast.

and the Northwest.

And over three quarters of those have been reported to the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group from shore.

So you don't need to go out in boats.

I was watching them there with my daughter just the other day.

And I would say one of them was between

was almost within 10 metres of the vantage point that we were looking at them from.

So sometimes they're so close to shore, you don't even need binoculars to see them.

So it's a really amazing opportunity for members of the public to get out and watch one of these most spectacular animals very, very close in shore.

Not really.

The south coast at this time of the year.

And it's an interesting one because they seem to arrive in big numbers in a local area.

And then they'll be seen every day for a couple of days, maybe a week, and then they're completely gone.

Now, whether they go or whether they just dive down deeper, of course,

being fish, we can only see them when they're on the surface.

And unlike whales and dolphins, which need to come up for air, being air-breathing mammals, you have a really good chance of seeing them.

But if those sharks are feeding on krill or zooplankton and they're a couple of metres down, you've absolutely no chance of seeing them because they're not going to, you know, they leave no visual cue on the surface.

So you could be swimming