Episode 4 Monty Halls' Great Irish Escape

This is the coast of Connemara in the west of Ireland.

I'm here to study the huge sea creatures that swim in these waters.

It's a phenomenal encounter, it really is.

That was moderately close.

And this glorious coastline is my office.

Oh, my god, look at that! Ridiculously beautiful.

Summer's arrived, with age-old traditions carrying on as strong as ever.

The regattas, the festivals, the culture. This is the good life.

And it's great fun, did I mention it was great fun? Whoo hoo hoo.

Fantastic.

This week, sharks arrive off the coast.

Well, that is the largest fish I've ever caught.

The famous Connemara ponies are put through their paces.

One of the horses came round the corner here and just ran straight into the sea.

And an emergency call-out to investigate reports that a dolphin's been attacking people.

When she wants to turn it on, by jingo she can turn it on.

As you can tell, it's midsummer on the west coast of Ireland.

I'm just heading out to go for a day's fishing with John Brittain,

and John's a...a local fisherman who catches and tags blue sharks.

Now, in all my career of travelling round and diving in exotic places and diving with all sorts of sharks,

I've never seen a blue shark and it's one of the most beautiful of all the sharks, and the tagging

programme that John's involved in is a very, very successful programme indeed, so it should be a nice day.

Apparently the weather is due to get worse over the course of today and we have to head offshore

to try and find the animals, so it should be quite an interesting day all round, I think.

Most people associate sharks with blue skies and bluer seas, but Ireland and the UK are part

of a massive migration route that brings blue sharks across from the Caribbean

before heading down the western seaboard of Europe and Africa.

John's home port of Cleggan is the first place they reach

after a 3,000 mile trip across the Atlantic.

John's helped me out several times already and he's become a mate.

Hello, John.

-Hiya, Monty.

-How are you?

-Not too bad.

-Good, good.

There's a man happy in his work, mashing up mackerel.

'John's deckhand is his son Pete, his job is

'to prepare the rubby dubby, a potent hash of fish that's irresistible to sharks.'

There's... There's a lot of ideas about how you make that stuff,

I just think you need lots of smashed-up mackerel.

-I agree, and a son.

-And a son, yeah right.

He's very very important, the two of them are crucial.

John's been tagging blue sharks for 20 years.

His favourite spot is about five miles offshore, and the rolling seas

combined with the smell of pulped mackerel is taking its toll.

The tags are a vital research tool for scientists trying to

monitor shark populations and where they travel.

Well, we're offshore now, we're about, come out about half an hour or so and this is my

first experience of being offshore in Connemara, we've pushed out into the Atlantic basically.

I'm trying very hard not to be seasick, and all around

us it looks completely baron but of course it's not because you've got currents moving under the sea,

and you've got all manner of animals out here that when you start putting stuff in the water, fish in

the water, they'll pick up the smell of it and things like blue sharks have gotta be real opportunists,

so if there's a hint of food, if there's just a feint ding of a...

of a dinner gong in the distance, they've got to go and investigate it and that's how John brings 'em in.

Now, Pete's just putting the rubby dubby over the side and it's

a mesh bag that's full of mashed-up fish and already you can see the oil spreading out on the water.

Anything that crosses that trail or goes anywhere near it is going to try and follow it to its source,

which is us, and already we've had a couple of common dolphins around the boat, which is a great sight,

so now we wait.

Blue sharks are the most widely distributed animal in the world, with sightings off

every continent except Antarctica, but they're also the most heavily fished of all the sharks.

Up to 20 million are killed each year,

either accidentally, as so-called by-catch, or for their fins.

Whoa, look at that, nicely hooked.

Do you see that very vivid blue colour? Hence the name blue shark,

and those wide pectoral fins, this is designed for cruising in open water.

Do you want to put the tag in, Monty?

-Yes, that'd be great.

-OK.

OK, so just there.

Put it in to there, that's it, yeah.

-OK, there we go.

-There it is.

-Fantastic. OK, fantastic.

-And what's the number?

-Ah, the number is 42113

-OK, remember that.

-42113.

-Ready to go back, and well done.

Beautiful, beautiful, let's get her back in.

-Do you want to take it?

-Yes, lovely.

-Mind the business end.

-Yeah, I certainly will.

-All right.

Wow, a solid great slab of muscle.

All right, well good luck to you, and off we go.

'That one was a tiddler, but they can grow to 12 feet long.

'They tend to move in packs, hence their nickname,

'the "wolves of the sea", so where there's one there should be more.'

-Ah, terrific.

-Stop winding.

OK, got it.

Whoa-ho!

-Ah.

-'This is more like it.'

Well done, guys. 'It's great to see an animal that's grown to maturity because so many die young.'

Well, you can see here, by the way, I'll keep my hands away from the head, but that's the nicitating

membrane, it closes over the eye, and the nose here, it's the

ampullae of Lorenzini that picked up the electricity, electric currents that everything gives out,

and the nostrils there, these are the senses this animal would have used to home in on the chum trail.

There's a bucket of water there, Peter,

I'm going to pour a bit of water onto him, don't let him get too dry.

If you could hand me the pliers there.

OK, the next stage is getting the tag in.

OK, so coming in... About there?

Yeah, that'll do.

-And there you go.

-Excellent.

We need to get this animal back in the water quickly.

What a beautiful sight, beautiful sight.

-Yeah, OK let's get her in.

-All right.

And off she goes, good girl.

Well, that is the largest fish I've ever caught.

Yeah, it's a good... That was a lovely fish, it was close to 100 pounds weight that fish,

we'll never know what weight for sure, but it was a big one.

Wonderful, that was a great experience, what a beautiful, beautiful animal.

John's tags have been recovered by scientists monitoring fish stocks as far away as the Cape Verde islands,

2,700 miles south.

Each tag adds to our knowledge of sharks, and may eventually lead to international protection measures.

We're gonna head back now, but a great day, you know,

it's obviously lovely to come out and have a great day's fishing

and catch the biggest fish I've ever caught in my life, but I think the significant thing here

is the tagging, there's two more blue sharks tagged out there now

and it's programmes like this that hopefully can provide the data

to actually get them protected in some shape or form.

So, brilliant, a great day all round, really.

One of the big things out here is currach racing.

Let me show you a currach.

There we are, that is a currach, and I want to become a team member in one of the boats, I think it's

a great old tradition. But I don't want to disgrace myself so I knew this would probably be an issue,

so I've brought my rowing machine with me out from England,

and this is my sort of secret training thing

to hopefully not embarrass myself too much when the currach racing season starts.

'The currach is a traditional rowing boat that fishermen have been using here for centuries.

'They're notoriously difficult to handle,

'as I found out when I entered a race at the Aran Islands Regatta.'

God!

The tradition had pretty much died out in my local village of Roundstone, but there's a plan

to revive the race this summer and I'm determined to win it, through brute strength if nothing else.

'18 minutes and I'm a broken man.

'I might have found a way to do my currach training on dry land, but when it comes to researching

'the whales and dolphins off my coast, there's no substitute for getting out on the water.'

This is the start of late summer and autumn

and gone are the halcyon golden days of May and June

when I had a mahogany tan

and it was perma sunshine, it was lovely, you know, gilded days.

And you can feel the first hint of autumn coming and it's getting a bit overcast, a little bit choppy,

the wind's picking up, it's a lot wetter, so the pressure's on now.

I've got about ten weeks left here

and I still don't really feel I've produced any meaningful results yet.

'Despite putting the hours in, it's been six weeks since I last saw

'the dolphins in my bay and I'm worried they may have moved elsewhere.

'But just as I was about to pack it in for the day.'

There they are, there they are, whoo, fantastic!

Oh, look at that, ohh, look at the size of them.

I haven't seen these guys for a few weeks now and here they are.

'When I had my first two encounters with the dolphins, I had

'high hopes of establishing that they were a resident pod

'living here year round.'

There they are.

'As ever, I need identification photos so

'I can try to match today's dolphins with the ones I saw six weeks ago.'

Oh, this is the one with... It's slightly disfigured, it's malformed.

Oh, Mont, you berk! That was right in the middle of my lens.

Ah-hah, photographing dolphins, the most frustrating thing in the world.

Hundreds and hundreds of appalling photographs, a wave, a cloud,

a bit of spray where a dolphin just was, that's my speciality.

But I think I've got two or three there that definitely you'll be able to ID the dolphins, and without

a doubt, I saw one of them with a very clear sort of hump in its back so that's very significant.

I haven't seen that before in this population of dolphins, so I need to get these photos,

I need to make a note of where I saw the animals, what the time is, what the water temperature is.

Fantastic, so nice to see 'em again,

It's like encountering a bunch of old muckers,

you know, I was getting a bit worried about them actually.

I think one of them recognised me, just gave me that little half-smile, that dolphin smile.

We're back in business. Now I'm going to catch some mackerel

and then go home before that lot arrives, that nasty weather.

The quicker we can do this, the better.

Mackerel! Oh, excellent.

Beautiful fish, now look at that.

I've caught one, which is good. Head in, I think.

Back home, my first job is to sort through the photos, and get the best

ones off to Simon Berrow, my boss at the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group, to see if he can match any up.

These are the images that I took this afternoon from the boat,

and there's one or two quite good ones there.

One of the really interesting ones is this one, as you can see this isn't a great shot

but it does show the dolphin with the deformity, the spinal

deformity behind the dorsal fin, the dorsal fin looks a bit weird.

I remember that out there seeing that it was sort of

over at one side, so there we are, that's the front of the dolphin just heading down there, you can see

the slightly wobbly dorsal fin and this hump behind it there

which Simon, I know, is very interested in.

I took some other photos on the 8th of May, and a week earlier as well, and I think the same animal

is in each photo, and I think it's an animal that repeatedly

approached the boat so that's the reason I kept getting a shot of it.

So to summarise what I think I'm seeing here is the same dolphin,

the same individual animal, as part of a pod, that I saw in May

I've now seen a month and a half later.

There's no proof that this is the case,

it's just an observation, but I'm going to send these off to Simon

and with any luck that's another piece of the jigsaw about the movements of these animals.

'Rubes has been trying to tell me something all afternoon.'

He's been coming up to me and nudging me and whining me...

You know, whining. And I think that he's been trying to say, "Look, there's a crow behind the toilet."

Is that what you've been on about, Rubes?

Rubes, Rubes, be nice. Rubes, you'll get your nose bitten again.

Good boy, Rubes, good boy.

So, we're going to have to catch him.

Rubes!

You're not helping, Reuben!

There we go, there, there he is, looking very sorry for himself.

Let's take him outside.

I'm going to put him under the kayak.

There he goes, he's off, he's gone into the hedge.

I hope you noticed my top-class wildlife filming techniques there.

Well done, Rubes, you did well, you did well, good boy,

good lad. I'll listen next time.

We can feel thoroughly good about ourselves now, having rescued the crow. What's that, Rubes?

There's an impala behind the fridge?

God, it just never ends, does it?

As part of my quest to kind of feed myself from the sea a little bit more and fish sustainably,

I'm going spear fishing off Inishlacken island, this little beach here, Inishlacken island,

and try and get some flatfish and maybe some pollock.

There's always been a great deal of debate about spear fishing

within the diving and the marine biological community about whether

it's a sustainable form of fishing or whether it isn't.

I think it is because you're targeting one animal, you're going out specifically looking

for something and you're targeting that individual animal as opposed to fishing from the shore where

you're just, you can catch anything, anything that'll eat your bait.

So, I'm quite happy to go out and just see if I can get

a couple of pollock or a couple of flounder which I'd just buy at the fish shop otherwise.

It's always lovely to have a snorkel. It's amazing the stuff you see off a little island like this,

very rich channel here, Roundstone is just there, Inishlacken here, Inishnee's over there, this is my,

my home turf, so I'll just have a little paddle through the shallows and see what I see.

The waters here are beautifully clear so you'd think I'd be able

to spot the flatfish without any problem,

but they're masters of disguise, burrowing in under the sands.

As a predator I couldn't have a worse disguise, silhouetted against

the sun, so the contest isn't as one-sided as it might look.

Well, there we go, that's dinner tonight. It's never nice to kill

anything but this is where your food comes from and, you know, if you eat fish or meat you should accept

that here we are, you know, animals have to die to do it.

So I'll cook this up tonight with a little bit of lemon,

really, really good eating these, and it's such a nice selective way of fishing, you see what you're

after and then you pick it off and that's it, and it's really, really rich out there at the moment,

it really is, cos it's August, the height of summer and there's so many fish around it's fantastic.

So there we go, and this chap is no longer a fish, he's now my dinner.

The village of Roundstone is only a mile or so across the bay,

but I've been so busy charging up and down the coast, I've barely spent any time there.

But everyone tells me there's a regular event through the summer that's unmissable.

It's Irish night, Wednesday night,

it's a sort of gathering of musicians and poets and traditional Irish culture

which is celebrated down here in the village hall, I've no idea

what to expect so let's go and see, but I'm not dancing.

IRISH MUSIC PLAYS

The hall is absolutely packed. This is no quaint tradition kept

alive for the tourists, this is the locals coming together to celebrate their own culture and heritage.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

-So now, Monty, try that!

-A piece of cake!

OK, so another one, another song.

Put your hands together for John Doyle.

Up until the 1820s, Connemara was considered unsettleable,

you know, it's bandit country, and then roads started to be pushed into

the mountains and settlers came, but it's always retained that incredibly strong sense of Irish identity

and this is the living embodiment of it, really.

It's a bastion of Irish culture, Connemara.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

I'm going to start on your special guest, Monty, he's going to join us up here.

This ain't gonna be pretty.

We have this poor man who has come all the way over from across the water to learn to dance.

-Hi, Monty.

-Right, this is going to be a shambles.

This is like a nightmare for me, like some sort of... Oh!

I haven't really got a clue what I'm doing, but...

-Oh, thank God!

-CHEERING

Great, brilliant, just brilliant.

Brilliant, well...

Phew, Michael Flatley watch out!

I think things like this are really important because, you know, it's a great thing for

the mix of nationalities that come to Roundstone during the summer to see a little slice of genuine

Irish culture. This is a living culture and the music and dancing

and everyone here dances, and everyone here plays an instrument,

a really vibrant living culture, and it's fantastic, excellent.

It's a great evening, hot and bothered but great evening.

I've had a call from the boss, to meet him at the Whale and Dolphin Group headquarters in Kilrush.

Just catching up with Simon about the photos I sent down that I took recently and see if they're the same

animals that I've seen before, cos if they are that raises all sorts of interesting issues.

'It would mean the IWDG could press for the dolphins in my bay to be protected by law.'

-Hello?

-Hello, Aoife, how are you?

'Aoife has been checking my photos and I'm hoping she's been able

'to match the latest batch with the ones I took earlier.'

And I know you've got my... I can see the photos on the screen there.

Your images from May and July of this year in Roundstone and Galway, so this picture

you took on the 3rd May in Connemara and you sent it in to Simon,

and then you sent in the photographs from 27th of July and we've just found there

it's the same guy, so you've re-sighted him, and he's at the same area.

'That's another match. Maybe I have discovered a resident population.'

Here we are. 'Meanwhile, Simon has discovered that the deformed dolphin

'was last seen five years ago, and further up the coast so it's surviving against all the odds.'

So, what's happened there, Simon, with this dolphin?

Scoliosis, it's a deformity of the spine.

Now, this could either be genetic, so you know it was born with it, or it could be caused by trauma during

birth, but what this is showing, cos I'm sure that has to be one of these, it looks like it's

that one to me, which is the same as that one - GB002 - so it's obviously surviving from it, which is amazing.

-Wow, wow, yeah.

-So yes, some more pieces of the jigsaw.

Yes, it builds ever so slowly, doesn't it?

'But suddenly the focus of the day shifts.

'A few dolphins around the world will let people swim with them,

'but one famous local dolphin called Dusty is causing concern.'

Em, we just spoke to George, who's the friend that...

She's with her now and the one thing he does say is she is attacking people.

-Attacking people? Really?

-Yeah.

-Wow.

'This is worrying news and suggests the dolphin is stressed by something.

'Simon's keen to find out what, but the weather is bad and getting worse

'so getting out to sea might not be an option.'

-So I mean, he said it would be... I'll see tomorrow.

-Yeah, in terms of the weather?

Yeah, if you can go up today that would be better. And Ken's a diver.

-I'm happy if you're happy.

-Yeah, we can try and go now.

We're going.

'Fanore is about an hour north of Kilrush.

'With the weather closing in, we only have a brief opportunity to get out and see what's going on.'

The whole idea of this is to go and get a look at this dolphin and just maybe try and find out

why the interactions might be a bit negative.

Simon's keen to have a look at the condition of the animal, see if it's pregnant or whatever.

'If she is pregnant, it could explain why she's being aggressive towards swimmers.'

OK, we've just seen her, she's right on the bow, here she comes.

At first sight everything seems fine, maybe it

was the swimmers that were causing the problems and not the dolphin.

It's obviously an incredibly powerful encounter,

you can see why people do get drawn into things like this.

She's come straight over to the boat. I'm probably just going to slip in the water and maybe

get a couple of photos and just see what she looks like from underneath.

'That frees Simon to deploy his hydrophone.

'He's trying to establish whether dolphins from different areas communicate in different dialects,

'so he's building up a database of dolphin voices for comparison.'

Right, in I go.

The first thing you notice is the sheer size of an adult bottlenose.

Dusty is 12 feet from nose to tail and twice as heavy as me.

If she wanted me out of the water, she'd make it perfectly clear.

You turn round, she's right in your face,

very curious, always seems to approach from behind but...

it'll only happen four or five runs, but, yeah, wonderful.

'Around the world, there are about 70 dolphins that interact

'with humans, but many have been killed or seriously injured by people who betrayed their trust.'

Very gentle, very mellow.

Absolutely beautiful, she's right at my fins

at the moment and you don't feel intimidated at all,

it's very gentle, very measured, very controlled encounter.

But when she wants to turn it on, by jingo she can turn it on and just boomf, she's gone, you know.

But she looks in great shape,

and perhaps earlier on she was just being harassed and just one of those things, you know, too many people.

That was wonderful - really, really, really special.

Won't forget that for a very, very long time.

To be really sure about Dusty's condition, Simon needs to study the underwater video we shot,

so it's back to base.

Would you say from your impression of looking at that, Simon, that she's in good shape?

Um...If you freeze it there I actually...

you know, yeah, she's not super-duper fat, she's not super-duper thin.

-I'd say she's kind of, you know, OK. I've seen fatter dolphins.

-Yeah, and what about the pregnancy side?

I was going to say if it is, she's in the very early stages because

they will start to kind of bulge out underneath, obviously, cos the calf is born

in a very advanced stage so it's very well developed and this is the peak time for calves now -

July, August, so no, I wouldn't, I'd say she isn't.

It was a tremendous experience swimming with the dolphin, obviously,

but I felt very uneasy, morally, about it, and I like the rationale of

going in and checking her condition and all that.

If you had a piece of advice for anyone who watched this

and thought, well, I should go and do that, what would it be?

It's a tricky one, isn't it, because my hardnosed scientific, my hardnosed management,

my hardnosed experience would say don't do it because it's going to end in tears, for the dolphin.

I don't really care about people so much, to be honest. It's just that we have a choice, they don't.

What I would like to think is the people would go away respecting dolphins,

respecting the marine environment.

I don't think they do.

I think with the solitary dolphin it's me, me, me, me, it's me and the dolphin interacting,

nothing to do with anything else and it's a purely self-gratifying, selfish experience.

They go away with that and come back for more of it.

Well, the dolphin's happy and healthy by the look of things, which is fantastic news,

but there is a real responsibility of swimming and interacting with dolphins in the wild, I think.

It's a responsibility I think we should take very seriously.

The Roundstone summer festival is just a few days away and I have medals on my mind.

It's time to put my land-based exercise regime to the test, out on the water.

My currach training continues, and I've managed to find

the only man in Ireland with less experience in a currach than me, and that's John.

-No experience at all.

-None at all, none whatsoever, whereas I've been in once.

John's a fellow marine biologist who's visiting from the UK.

Our trainer is Roundstone legend Paddy "Shoulders" McDonough,

-a former all-Ireland Currach racing champion.

-Who's going on the head oars?

I'll be the head oars.

I'm the experienced man here. This is the rookie.

Absolute rookie.

Paddy's bravely lending us a currach,

but wisely, he's staying ashore.

'John's worryingly competent,

'although I like to think that the technique honed on the rowing machine

'means that I'm putting a lot more back into it than he is. Even Paddy's impressed.'

We'll have to enter this Monty for the Olympic Games, I think.

'Reuben infallibly knows when I'm in mortal danger, even if I don't.

'He's decided it's time I was rescued.'

Could you call him, John?

Rubey, come here, boy.

Go on, Rubesy.

'The session restarts with a vengeance,

'but my freakish upper-body strength is about to bring it all to a shuddering halt.

'I've broken the wooden pin that holds the oar.'

It's lasted 50 years and we've broken it.

And we've broken it in two minutes.

Right, try not to break it again.

Come on, Rubesy.

It's the biggest stick he's ever seen.

Come on, Rubesy.

'Paddy, Ruben, John and me, three men and a dog with just one aim -

'to take the Roundstone Summerfest by storm.'

If currachs were essential to the fishing round here.

then Connemara ponies were the same for the farmers.

They were literally the work horses, and famous around the world for it.

The breed nearly died out when tractors replaced them, but today they're making a big comeback.

This is Omey beach, and it's one of the most unusual sporting venues in the world.

If I was doing this walk in six hours' time through this car park, I would be swimming, basically,

because this is Omey races and when the tide goes out,

they race horses here.

The Connemara pony is Ireland's only native breed.

Early farmers broke in ponies from wild herds that had a history dating back to the ancient Celts.

There's a local man called Joe McNamara. He trains horses and he's entered a few in the race.

I'm just going to have a natter with him, find out, find out what it's all about, basically.

-I'm all in a lather.

-Are you?

-Oh, yeah, we're on in the next race.

-Oh, are you?

It's the most prestigious racing in Ireland.

If you cast your mind back when we were living in the caves

-and horses were feared animals...

-Yeah.

Us Paddies went and tamed, and the first thing we did we took 'em down to the beach

and we tied 'em and let the sea come in and when they were half drowned, we could manage them.

-Oh, is that right?

-Yes.

-Is that where it all comes from?

So this is, this is living history, being here. Living heritage and culture.

But on a very serious note, racing in the west of Ireland

would go back to when times were hard,

when the horses weren't a luxury item.

Horses had to work for their living, so if you look around you

here on the shoreline, we had the seaweed - that was harvested

and brought to the fields and spread. The horse brought it.

I was going to ask you about the Connemara pony. I've seen loads of them as I've been driving round.

What was the origins of the Connemara? I've heard they swam ashore from a Spanish Armada...

I think to myself that's coming out of the mist, isn't it, aye, a little bit of...

-A bit of romance, no harm, is it?

-Yeah, nice story.

I can probably make up loads of stories, so old that my grandfather told me.

-These are your horses, are they?

-This is mine.

-Absolutely beautiful.

So you'd... a bit of Connemara pony, bit of and a thoroughbred, right.

In fact it was a great combination, the thoroughbred and the Connemara pony,

because it gave them the, you know the ability of the thoroughbred and that toughness of the Connemara.

It's such a fundamental working tool having a good horse, and so you are looking at centuries,

thousands of years of breeding and this is the end result.

But it's not just the horses that are a special breed.

The same goes for the jockeys.

Irish jockeys race at the highest level all over the world,

and many hone their skills as kids, riding in beach races just like this.

It takes a lot of guts to go out and do these races, you know,

they're flat out,

and the sand's pretty hard. If you fall off, you'd hurt yourself,

They're going round this course at 30 miles an hour on top of half a ton of snorting muscle.

It has to be in your DNA to do that, I think.

A moment ago, in one of the races - a lot of the horses are trained on the beach and in the water,

they run in the sea, and there was a touch of Reuben about the whole thing

One of the horses came round this corner here as part of a racing group, saw the sea and thought,

brilliant, and just ran straight into the sea with a very startled young jockey on the back.

'Joe's horse in the big race is ridden by the jockey in blue colours.'

'It's been a fantastic day's racing, and once again Joe's ended up in the winners' enclosure.

'Brilliant.'

But the work never stops.

I'm following Simon's car. He's been told a dolphin has washed up on the banks of the Shannon estuary.

This is a bottlenose dolphin calf that was found by the farmer

who is leading us to the site of the stranding,

and he's worked this land obviously for years, for generations, his family has,

and he was saying he's never seen this,

and Simon in 20 years of working the Shannon estuary has never seen a calf strand.

'But when we get to the site it turns out it's not a calf, nor is it a bottlenose.

'The first thing to do with any stranding is to identify the animal correctly.'

So what's the defining feature?

-Um, well, oh, the defining feature.

-Define in terms of the markings?

In terms of the markings, it's the white belly and the line coming back from the eye.

There's another word for the line, is a?

-Um, ohh.

-Stripe.

A stripe, this would be a striped dolphin.

-To be honest it's remarkably clean.

-It is, isn't it?

'Simon's looking for clues as to why it died and why it's stranded.

'But with no obviously fatal injuries, this carcass will be taken for autopsy

'at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology.'

There's been no event here.

So it presents a bit of a riddle - why this would strand here and...

It is, so this one would be a great one for post-mortem because

it's an adult so it will have..., you know, why is it stranded?

'Around 150 whales and dolphins strand in Ireland each year.

'Most are already dead but the few that survive need to be carefully lifted back into the water.

'Simon's teaching me the procedure to follow, should I ever need to do it myself.'

Now obviously if you've got a whale you ain't going to be...

or a bottlenose, I mean, what would a big bottlenose weigh?

400 kilos? A big one, I mean maybe sort of 300 more realistic for Ireland.

That's not too bad now, so you can lift, two people can lift this.

One person could almost lift this.

OK, one, two, three.

I've drawn the short straw to deliver the carcass to the labs.

It's been a two-hour drive

with a suppurating dolphin carcass in the back of the car...

which feels faintly illegal for some reason, faintly sinister.

I'm here now, anyway.

'There's a huge backlog of dolphin post-mortems so this one will be stored

'in a freezer until scientists can do an autopsy later in the year.'

'But the whole thing's got me thinking.

'Simon has a genuine problem and so does anyone working along the coast of Ireland of recovering

'these animals when they're ashore, particularly when it's a live animal,

'getting it back into the sea, and it's given me it a bit of an idea.'

The idea I've had is...

I do worry a little bit about my genuine contribution to the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group.

I'm trying hard at Roundstone and gathering data

but I dunno, you know, it's interesting but does it advance the work?

I'll tell you what would really advance the work, Simon does an awful lot of this,

he does an awful lot of responding to calls of stranded animals with limited gear.

'I'd really like to help him raise enough money over the next couple of months

'so the IWDG could buy an inflatable pontoon,

'designed for floating live whales and dolphins back out to sea.'

There's very few of them around. It's such a crucial piece of kit

for getting animals back in the water and I think it's a real legacy

for my time here that I can leave that for the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group.

It's a big challenge, a big challenge - they cost thousands of euro

but, er...

it's doable - if I really go flat out it's doable, I think.

I've been sent a bit of footage by Simon of a striped dolphin stranding in 2006. What a great illustration.

All you want to do is help, don't you.

You see this animal struggling onshore and gradually the tide's gone out

and you've got this striped dolphin just sitting high and dry, you know - you can seed

we'd all feel like that, wouldn't we, just desperate to get the poor thing back in the water.

Rotten, rotten feeling, so this would be a great example of an animal that could be saved

using that pontoon.

If we raise enough money for this pontoon you probably won't use it for three, four, five years

and then when you do use it it'll be the greatest day of your life,

and the greatest day of the community's life,

rescuing a young whale or a dolphin and watching it swim back out to sea.

It's the start of the Roundstone summer festival, which is kind of four days of traditional music,

games and general silliness and buffoonery, so this evening this street will be absolutely buzzing,

it's a big old date in the Roundstone calendar.

This is the brush dance. I've seen this done several times in Roundstone around Connemara.

It gets very, very complicated later on.

I have been practising this in the cottage on my own.

That's how I clean the cottage nowadays.

If you look behind me, this is a fishing competition and the whole idea of the competition

is the maximum number of species, not the biggest fish, and so guys use loads of different techniques,

fishing on the bottom with tiny hooks and things like that,

and the great thing is you look at the kids and it's fascinating for them,

it's like creatures from another world, and it's where it all started for me.

What's the flat fish there?

I'm not sure about that.

I think it's a plaice, isn't it, because it's got you know orange dots on it.

-It looks weird, look at the eyes.

-Yeah.

-Do you know that the eyes start as a normal fish,

-Seriously?

-It swims around like a normal fish and then the eye, it's like your eyes moving onto

the side of your head and you lying on your bed all the time, that's what happens to that fish.

And what's the biggest one of these ever caught, do you think?

Basking sharks, and you get them round here, yeah, we stuck some tags

in some a little while back, and they're the same size and weight as a London double-decker bus.

I'm going to go and ambush Simon, to see how many species have been caught. Cheers, chaps.

'Simon Ash is fisheries manager on the local salmon river.

'Fish swim in his blood.'

-I've found Simon. I've followed the odour of fish that invariably leads to Simon.

-Me!

-So what's the species total?

-We have 19 species.

-19 species?

-Yeah, yeah, which is pretty good.

That's not a bad old spread, really, is it?

-It's good.

-Yeah, yeah.

-But the biggest, the best boat only got nine.

I'll let you hand out the prizes. You've got a keen... all these kids are desperate to hear who's won.

-Yeah, OK, we'll do that.

-I'll get out of your hair.

I can see where the fishing competition comes from. This is, after all, a fishing village.

The dancing and the music are traditional.

Slightly harder to explain is what's going on down on the quayside.

The challenge is to get the golf ball on to the green. There it is. I'm going to have a go.

I've got a ball retrieval device.

Right, then.

Golf is all in the mind. I'm going to be the ball.

Ohh, a bit wide.

-Does everyone try and hit the bloke in the boat?

-Yeah.

Yeah!

Fantastic. Thank you.

It's 30 thousand euro prize money, apparently.

Very good, very good.

Golf's one thing but tomorrow's the real test,

the currach race.

'Day two of the festival, and the weather's glorious.

'Whether my sporting prowess will match up remains to be seen,

'as my mentor Paddy heads out to set the course for the racing.'

The great day has dawned. This is Sunday, and it's the day of the currach race,

the Roundstone summerfest currach race,

and of course I've been doing lots of training,

I've had fantastic coaching from this currach legend, Paddy, and it'd be very interesting to see

whether training and coaching is effective against people who've just been doing it their entire lives.

I'm going to be racing against the young guys who are going to be apocalyptically hung over,

so we'll see which one will triumph.

Of course I have got a bit of previous here

because I raced in the Arans and came last.

I came so last that the guy who won beat me by several days.

He had a chance to go to the mainland, study for a degree, get married

and raise a family before I even got into the beach.

All will be revealed in the next half-hour.

Word of my training regime on land and sea has got out.

The organiser, Thomas King, is clearly stunned that anyone has done any preparation at all.

-How are you feeling?

-Quietly confident.

-Rumour has it you've been training?

-Yeah, I have been secretly training...

-Well, you have a big advantage on these guys.

I think half of them are drunk, which is very important in this event, isn't it, you know.

I wouldn't say drunk, no I'd say there's one or two that are...

enjoying the day but the other guys are taking it fairly seriously.

Yeah. I've got a rowing machine outside my cottage,

-which is ridiculous, having all this.

-How do you steer that? They're pretty hard to steer.

Yeah, that's a very good point. I struggle.

'The teams of four are chosen at random.

'The names come out of a hat and are assigned to one of three boats.'

And the blue boat, Kieran Barry, Jonty Reagan, Monty and Rory Brown, and the black boat, Colman King,

Mark Brown, Michael Sullivan and Kieran Hinds.

OK?

HORN BLOWS

'It's a relay race and I'm rowing the third leg,

'so I'm carefully watching to see if I can pick up any tactics.

'By the time my turn comes, we're holding on to second place.

'All I have to do is hold my nerve and hope the leaders lose theirs.

'It all sounds so simple.

'But then it happens again.'

-Ah, sh... 'I've broken the oar pin.'

-Ah, you've broke it!

-It's bust. Paddy, Paddy, Paddy!

It's bust.

'With the crowds growing restless,

'the organisers agree to freeze the race

'where it stands and restart once Paddy has repaired the pin.'

We're good.

On the restart it's all going swimmingly.

I'm more than holding my own.

I'm even closing the gap.

All that training is paying off.

'At the final handover, our rivals' fourth oarsman

'inexplicably finds it almost impossible to get his life jacket on.

'Whilst he struggles, we sneak into first place.'

HORN BLOWS

Well, done mate. Beautiful, beautiful.

Well, that had a little bit of everything, that race,

it had a little bit of drama, bit of controversy, genuinely competitive,

and the crowd I think sort of lapsed into a slightly stunned silence by the end of it,

just wondered what on earth was going to happen next.

And I broke a thing out there again, I've got a bit of a habit of that. I'm not terribly lucky with it.

but brilliant, nonetheless we won, in the end, I think we won.

Yeah, very good, all that training paid off.

Big round of applause for the winners.

They did a fantastic job, Monty.

The team have been away for several months, high-altitude training specifically for this event

and we like to think it's the first ever Roundstone relay currach race

and almost definitely the last, as well,

so we'll be champions forever - well done fellas, awesome, cheers.

Thanks very much, guys. Back to the music. Have a great evening.

The food of champions.

It's another beautiful day and John Brittain, who I went shark fishing with,

has called to say basking sharks have been spotted off my bit of the coast.

-Gemma, this is Blue Water.

-Blue Water, go ahead, over.

Monty, if you see a large group of rocks to our south west, I will go up the south side

and keeping an eye out for the basking sharks,

if you stay outside and come with me to the far side, over.

Basking sharks are the second largest fish in the sea. Only whale sharks are bigger.

Despite their size, we know next to nothing about them.

I've managed to tag some basking sharks in the far north of Ireland

but it's very rare to see them off Connemara.

The search begins. There could be a dozen just below the surface

but unless you spot their fins, you'd never know.

There he is, there he is, got him, got it there.

Hello Blue Water, this is Dive Boat Gemma, we've got the shark,

he's just on my port side about 50 metres away from me.

When you get one shark on the surface, all the fishermen,

everyone, the west coast of Scotland, in Ireland,

they all say that for every one on the surface, there we are, for every one on the surface there's

always a couple underneath, which is great news, you know, this could be,

and probably will be my one chance to tag sharks in Connemara.

'My currach training partner John is jumping aboard

'to drive the boat while I try to get a tag into the shark.

'The tag has a barb that I've got to get into the shark's skin, just below the dorsal fin.'

Ah, straight ahead I think.

That's good.

OK, there he is, there he is,

now come in nice and steady mate, just nice and steady,

OK in you come, just a little bit more now, OK give it a bit more welly now.

-OK.

-Bit more.

It's in,

Fantastic.

We have tagged our first Connemara shark,

superb, superb.

That is a big moment,

that is a big moment,

I was really thinking we weren't going to get one, I was really thinking

we weren't going to get a Connemara tagging,

and that's absolutely superb.

'The sharks are sticking around.

'The water must be bursting with plankton so a second tagging is definitely on the cards.'

Tag three seven seven.

'The tag has gone but I didn't see it go into the shark so I want to be

'absolutely certain before I leave them to carry on feeding.'

-Yeah, there you go.

-Three seven seven.

Tag three seven seven is in, that's terrific, that's terrific.

Superb, I've got a couple of tags in and that means the world, it really does,

because I was so, I was becoming so convinced

that it wasn't going to happen here,

and just to know the baskers is here is superb, yeah, this is a...

a threatened animal and it's very rarely seen in Connemara

and to get two tags in two animals, I'm made up.

Advancing mankind's knowledge of an ocean giant,

and having a very, very good time at the same time.

'Next time, when hookers go bad.

'A close shave racing traditional sailboats in Galway Bay.'

If we send two vehicles up here the most likely place...

'And a search and rescue mission to find a basking shark stranded somewhere in the dark.'

Up ahead of me I've got mysterious shadowy figures.

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