A Porpoise Named Peppa

Eyes raised on impulse. Three or four metres from the incoming tideline was a mass of grey different to the grey of the turn-of-season water.

A fin. A face.

Hard to tell at first whether this finned, faced, something was moving in the water or because of it. With every breaking wave the creature hulked closer, and it became apparent that the motion had been misleading. This dolphin was, to quote the boy, quite broken.

Its skin, which from a distance had seemed pearlescent, had, on closer inspection, started to come away from its body like one of those cheap chemical foot peels. It heaved to a full stop at my feet, which had carried me to the tideline of their own accord. 

Though I'd lived on the Isle of Wight for six years, this was the first time I had seen a dolphin – dead or otherwise. Until now, my cultural references to marine mammals revolved around classic cinema and childhood crushes: from Jesse in Free Willy to a young Elijah Wood in Flipper. 

Drawing on his own cultural cache – Julia Donaldson’s Snail and the Whale – my son suggested we call a fire engine. I suspected it might be a bit late for that. But the boy had a point: someone needed to call somebody.

Edging up the shingle bank still facing the creature – it felt disrespectful to turn my back on it now – to my rucksack (pink and white, Jansport, 20 years old, recently recovered from the back of the hall cupboard), I foraged in the front Discman pocket for my iPhone. 

Googling [“dead dolphin” + “Isle of Wight”] for the first – but not the last – time I am struck by the volume of results: 1,700 unique hits with as many images. I scan the locations, assuming much of the content to be aggregated. But no: Dead dolphin washed up at Sandown, Dead dolphin discovered at Shanklin. Dead dolphins at Bonchurch, Brighstone, Blackgang, Brook. 

Three pages in, I click through to a Facebook page for a local marine charity and make a call. 

At home, my more pragmatic husband – who has been receiving regular Whatsapp updates – does the same, to the Isle of Wight Council. As I wait for the arrival of action in either form, I stand guard over what I have very quickly come to think of as my dead dolphin. 

It shifts slightly – or, rather, is shifted – and comes to rest shoreside. The beach is quiet but not empty. Now and then I reluctantly take on the role of temporary signposter: “It’s been reported!” I hear myself saying to a dog walker; “Someone is coming!” I call out to a jogger who has slowed at the spectacle; “The appropriate agencies have been informed!” I say to a couple who have turned the corner from Priory Bay and stumbled upon a toddler eyeing a corpse.  

‘Captain’ Garry Oates, the founder of Blue Seas Protection, beats the Council to it. By two whole days, as it turns out. 

He arrives wearing a fluorescent jacket; the universal uniform of authority. I must be further along the beach than I had described on the phone. There are an awkward few minutes in which I know that it is him approaching (on account of the yellow vest) and he knows it is me in waiting (on account of the dead dolphin) but the point between seeing and greeting is protracted by the size of the pebbles which make walking on this part of the beach an inelegant affair. 

On final approach, he sees the dolphin and wrings his hands in an expression of torment at odds with his workmanlike demeanour. “Oh it’s terrible,” he says, sea-weathered eyes and accent marking him as Marriner material. “So sad.” He wipes away a tear (or sand). “Poor thing.” 

He then tells me three things. First, my dead dolphin wasn’t a dead dolphin after all, but a dead porpoise. Second, porpoises (along with whales and dolphins) belong to a group of marine mammals called cetaceans – not to be confused with crustaceans. Finally, this particular porpoise was almost certainly a victim of bycatch. Between the wind and the waves, I mishear this as ‘by cwytch’, conjuring confusing images of death by underwater Welsh cuddles. Luckily I keep this to myself and all is explained. 

Gesturing out to sea where a France-bound Brittany Ferry and a Portsmouth-bound container ship are passing behind St. Helens Fort, Captain Garry Oates tells me that commercial trawlers have once again been illegally active in the English Channel.

He explains how these giant industrial vessels drag miles of weighted nets along the seabed, indiscriminately hauling in tonnes of fish along with anything else that happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time: seabirds, turtles, debris, waste. Cetaceans. In the fishing industry, these accidental captures are known as bycatch. Despite its incidental sounding name, bycatch is brutal. 

That evening, after reading a bedtime Snail and the Whale with a fresh sense of sobriety, I open my laptop. Sure enough, over the past few years some of the world’s largest trawlers had been spotted fishing in waters off the Isle of Wight: Dutch-registered 126 metre-long ‘Afrika’; 143 metre-long ‘Margiris’, weighing over 9,000 tonnes and banned from Australian waters; 86 metre long German-owned factory trawler ‘Annie Hillina’. One Tik-Tok tangent and several YouTube sessions later are enough to convince me that the horrors of bycatch are real.  Garry’s claims hold up: in 2019, The Guardian reported a record number of mutilated dolphins washed up along the French coast, suspected slaughtered by the crew of commercial trawlers. I switch back and forth between these pictures and my camera roll, zooming in to point of pixelation: was that a gash from a rock or a wound from a rope? That laceration there – did it look linear and knifelike or jaggedly accidental? Was it too late to say? 

For the next few weeks, I lose myself down a rabbit hole of marine traffic tracking, secretly hoping for a ‘gotcha’ moment that would allow me to trace my dead porpoise back to a single vessel. But there is not a trawler in trace: only a steady stream of cargo carriers, sailing boats, and crisscrossing cruise liners – plus a handful of high-speed vessels and end-of-season pleasure craft. 

I was involved now. Somehow, I was going to find out what happened to my porpoise. 

I enthusiastically regaled as much in my weekly MA journalism seminar. “How interesting,” my tutor says. “And how do you think you might move that along?” 

I say all the ideas and hope one sticks: I could infiltrate a trawler, join Greenpeace on patrol, uncover a global network of marine murderers and map it all out on a piece of ultimately award-winning data journalism. 

“You could…” she says slowly, not wanting to break my spirit nor fan my flame in a dangerous direction. “But a better first step might be talking to some experts.”

If you’re in the market for an expert on the causes of cetacean deaths, as I was, the internet will deliver you Rob Deaville. He is, quite literally (so says his Twitter handle) The Strandings Man. 

Rob has managed the UK Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme (CSIP) for 16 years. Jointly funded by DEFRA, the Scottish and Welsh Governments, their official remit is to monitor cetacean strandings around the UK coast and investigate them post-mortem. 

We talk on Zoom. It is November 2020 – the middle of a second national lockdown – and carcass collections have been temporarily suspended. In any case, my dead porpoise was judged too decomposed to warrant the round trip from CSIP HQ at the Zoological Society of London.

Still, I am keen to get his take on how she (that assumed shipwreck she) might have died. By now I have done my research: enough to know, at least, that bycatch is the leading cause of cetacean deaths worldwide. In the UK alone, according to a joint study by the WWF and Sky Ocean Rescue, three harbour porpoises die in fishing gear every day – over a thousand annually.

Was that it, then – case closed, story over before it began? 

Not necessarily, says Rob Deaville The Strandings Man. “Yes, there are the fairly obvious direct Anthropogenic drivers of mortality - things like bycatch and ship strike. But there are also Anthropogenic drivers which are indirect like exposure to marine pollution, climate change, and so on. And then there are the natural drivers of mortality – harbour porpoises might be attacked by bottlenose dolphins or predated on by grey seals. Cetaceans face multiple threats: some of which are natural and some of which are unnatural. That’s what we’re here to find out.” 

The angles widen. In time, I talk to other experts closer to home. Each tells me a variation of this same inconvenient truth.  A marine biologist will caution me against over extrapolation: “It’s easy to assume that there’s some kind of mass event” he says, referring to impassioned individuals of local nature Facebook groups. “But a lot of strandings are very badly decayed, have come from hundreds of miles away, and have nothing to do with the seas locally.” A marine mammal medic responds with a sigh – and the sigh says “how long’s a piece of string?”

It’s an uncomfortable place for an early-career journalist to be. I know that I should embrace this state of messiness which others call nuance, but I can’t seem to shake that editorial voice on my shoulder: “Drop and give me a nutgraf” and “A topline – once more with feeling!” 

I feel like I should set the scene. The Isle of Wight is the largest island in the UK, some fifteen miles off the largest island in Europe. But the shape, substance, and statutes of the water which surrounds it are slippery.

Over 300 square kilometres of its waters are theoretically protected by an underwater array of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and Marine Conservation Zones (MCZs). Each denotes a site of special interest: some for their marine megafauna, some for their nationally scarce seaweed, others because of their vital subtidal sand and sediment habitats. Priory Point – the stretch of beach between St. Helens and Priory Bay proper – where I found my porpoise is part of the Bembridge Marine Conservation Zone; a vital breeding ground for starfish, short-snouted seahorses, and stalked jellyfish.

These classifications are designed to prevent destructive activity – including overfishing – and protect biodiversity.

Water flows. This has led to MPAs and MCZs being widely known as ‘paper parks’ – ineffective and ephemeral.  

Policing this patchwork of protected waters lies with multiple agencies. The Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority (IFCA) are responsible for the enforcement of fisheries legislation up to the inshore fishing boundary of six nautical miles. Meanwhile, the Marine Management Organisation (MMO) has overall responsibility for the protection of marine environments and administration of the byelaws which safeguard fish stocks, underwater ecosystems, and wildlife in the UK’s network of marine protected areas.

Garry Oates doesn’t hold much faith in either: “they’re all useless from my personal experience – it’s really frustrating to me.” He’s not the only one with such a dim view. Local fisherman of over 40 years Mike Curtis, of Captain Stan’s Bembridge Fish Store, says he sees international trawlers in forbidden areas “all the time”, sometimes specifically targeting seabass – a protected species and firm dietary favourite of cetaceans. Just recently, he says, he reported a foreign-registered vessel fishing off the South Coast of the Isle of Wight with its automatic identification system (AIS) off, providing video evidence to the MMO. “But they don’t enforce it at all,” Mike says. “They just don’t care.” The official response from the MMO is that they "adopt a risk-based approach" to the monitoring and enforcement measures at their disposal. Information on potential offending is evaluated in line with the National Intelligence Model – the same framework which informs the response to criminal investigations.

Waters around the Isle of Wight are also partly protected by the Royal Navy’s Overseas Patrol Squadron. On the FastCat ferry back to Ryde Harbour from my first trip to London in almost three years, I meet staff crew member Rod Cornwell. Before Wightlink, he worked fishing enforcement with the Navy from Portsmouth Harbour. Part of his job involved boarding ships and checking fishing quotas. I ask him – as I ask everyone, these days – about bycatch. “Oh yes,” he says. “The amount of wastage on those fishing vessels was absolutely indiscriminate – the things you saw.” 

Curious to learn exactly how many, I submit a total of 20 Freedom of Information Requests to all UK police jurisdictions with a coastline. Bar a summer internship as a picture researcher, it is the most time I have ever spent copying and pasting: the pinnacle of investigative journalism dreams. As the results trickle in one by one, a pattern forms. Crimes against cetaceans are, it turns out, not ‘Home Office recordable’ – they have no official classification code. Still a crime, but too niche to warrant its own column on the grand master criminal spreadsheet. As such, there is no easy way of sorting through the data which I have asked for. Some help anyway, using a manual keyword search. Others deem it too laborious a task. Either way, the results are the same: the overwhelming majority of UK coastal police forces have no crimes recorded relating to cetaceans at all. Each has their own way of putting it: "no information stored", "zero records", "does not hold any information pertinent to the request."  Cleveland – which has eight miles of unbroken beaches upon which cetaceans sometimes strand, one of which recently played host to a life-sized model of a sperm whale as part of an interactive piece of environmental theatre – hasn’t recorded any Wildlife Crime (cetacean or otherwise) at all since 2015. Nil points. Those that did report a small number of incidents – Devon & Cornwall, Norfolk, Northumbria, and North Wales – cited evidential difficulties, resulting in no suspect being identified. 

PC Mark Webb is the Wildlife and Rural Crime officer for the whole of Hampshire Constabulary – covering the Isle of Wight but based in Bishops Waltham. For ten years before that, he was a marine unit officer. He can only recall four incidents of cetacean disturbance; all to the South of the Island, all by leisure powerboats. Over email, he tells me that the lack of statistical priority given to wildlife crime by the government means that they can be open to different interpretations by different forces. “It would be fair to say that crimes against cetaceans are rarely identified and reported,” he says. “Often we are never advised that a crime has occurred, let alone having enough evidence to identify an offender or proceed to prosecution.” 

Still, there is some hope. Launched in 2021, Operation Seabird is a joint national effort between the MMO, wildlife groups including the British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR) and RSPCA, and coastal constabularies to raise the profile of marine-based wildlife crime. PC Webb cites the recent successful prosecution by North Yorkshire Police of a cetacean-corralling speed boat owner.

Until now, I had been thinking of the place where she lay as a crime scene. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe she was just disorientated, as I am now. 

After all, the Solent is far from silent. Its twin harbours are a constant hive of activity. Portsmouth, the UK’s second busiest cross-Channel port, has over 300 significant movements a day. It may not have the levels of military sonar said to have caused the mass strandings of dolphins across the Black Sea region, but active sonar is enabled (“when operationally necessary and for training purposes”) at various frequencies throughout the Royal Navy’s Portsmouth Harbour fleet: echo sounders for safe navigation, anti-submarine warfare, and mine clearance. Southampton too, as the UK’s ‘most productive’ container port, ‘number one’ vehicle handling port, and ‘Europe’s leading’ turnaround cruise port, produces a daily underwater symphony. During Cowes week, a cacophony. Its latest purpose-built deepwater quay saw a major dredging operation to 16 metres below low water to welcome the biggest ships in the world; carrying solar panels from Suez, air conditioning units from Antwerp, towers and tonnes from Tangiers. 

It is the underwater equivalent of a school fair: high-pitched skipping rope squeals, feedback from the too-old sound system, a basketball ricocheting out of time. While we can grin and bear it, cetaceans cannot.

As the slightest scrape inflames a hangover, noise pollution will further traumatise an already less-than-healthy cetacean. 

Beyond noise, marine pollution is a major impairment to cetacean’s immune systems. Most often, we conceptualise this in Big Pictures: entanglement in the tail of a birthday balloon, golf-ball down the blowhole, the ingested DVD case that broke the sei whale’s back.

These are only the most visible examples. 

Cetaceans are bioaccumulators. They feast not only on fish but on all the things we cannot see. Macro and micro marine plastics, yes, but also substances like the pesticide DDT and PCBs – highly carcinogenic chemical compounds once used ubiquitously in everything from cosmetics to clothing. Both banned for decades but still heavily present in marine environments. Many man-made pollutants (past and present) are lipophilic, meaning they are easily absorbed in the fat which constitutes between 15% and 55% of a cetacean’s body mass. Harbour porpoises like mine are particularly susceptible to the reproductive effects of toxic PCB accumulation, resulting in poor fertility in juvenile males and miscarriage in females. Calves that make it to term are born carrying a neurotoxic cocktail of chemicals which increases with each feed from its mother’s milk. Because of this, the toxicological analysis of blubber has been a historical focus of CSIP post-mortem investigations. 

I am filter feeding now: accumulating cetacean-based knowledge at a rate of knots.  At the same time, I am accumulating knowledge on a parallel course. In January 2022, prompted by a prolonged sense of powerlessness and regular waves of eco-guilt, I swap my job as the Editor of local lifestyle magazine ‘Style of Wight’ for Editor at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The cultural and content shock is real, but as I navigate the long-craved transition from crewnecks to climate change, brunch to biodiversity loss, and crushing consumerism to the circular economy, the bigger picture starts to sink in. A work-based crash course in ‘systems-thinking’ helps me to better understand the complexity of strandings. 

I already know from Rob the Strandings Man that the idea of a single death is misleading. Death is no more definitive than life is linear. In cetaceans, each co-morbidity has a corresponding co-morbidity: one that is severely malnourished may have overlapping symptoms including infection of the central nervous system, viral load, or parasitic infestation.

Many scientists, academics, and practitioners – Rob Deaville included – describe cetaceans as a sentinel species for both ocean health and human health. Witnessing what is happening to them tells us both what is happening in our waters and what will happen to us.

A Canary in the Solent.

Though it looked less and less likely that I would ever get to the bottom of my porpoise’s death, I felt compelled to finish what I had started. If I didn’t try, I wasn’t sure anyone else would. One harbour porpoise on the Isle of Wight wasn’t going to raise alarm bells: it wasn’t a humpback whale in the Amazon rainforest, mass event on a remote New Zealand beach, or even a 12-metre-long marine giant in Clacton-on-Sea. A minor mort, not a Great Dying – yet.

Months pass. Naomi and I check in every now and then, but nothing. 

Nothing alive, at least. One strands and strands again. Local news outlet Island Echo report the discovery of a dead dolphin on Players Beach in Binstead. The hero image is far more gruesome than mine; charred and swollen, the colour of rusty nails.

Several of the comments underneath indicate that it had been floating around for a while: one had reported it two days previously, another a week before that. Someone else claimed it had landed on the beach near Ryde Pier Head – three miles away, three weeks ago.  Local resident Leah Southam tells me that she called the council, who told her “it wasn’t their problem.” Island Roads said – since the beach was a privately owned one – much the same. Someone else called The Coastguard, who took measurements for the CSIP (at least). Another rang the Bembridge RNLI, who rang the council waste team, who "weren't interested."

By Saturday 25th June it had washed back out to sea on a high tide. Its smell remained: “like foul rotten meat, with the hint of something else that turned my stomach” Leah remembers.

As is often the case in conversations about climate change, plastic pollution acts as the ice-breaker to other things. He tells me of balloons mistaken for buoys and a lego door wrapped around a dogfish’s head. 

It is the Summer Solstice. The boat rounds the corner towards Luccombe and I realise that we are directly below the coastal road that a year ago was my commute to work. From here, you can just about make out the bend at which the car radio would crackle-switch from Isle of Wight Radio to French station NRJ à Cherbourg. Further along, Ed points out a landslip; this side of the Island, from here and back to Ventnor, Bonchurch. St. Lawrence, Niton, and Blackgang is known as the Undercliff, the largest urban landslide complex in North-West Europe. “It was really hot, that first lockdown, and it just cracked – the land just came away. It took a long time to clear, we couldn’t net around here at all because there was just so much debris.” 

On land and at sea, stability is shifting at speed. “We always used to get tonnes of kelp” Ed tells me. “It’d be 10 foot long and get to the point where you literally couldn’t cut through it. But now we just don’t get it – only this mayweed stuff which grows like mad.” Although there are parts of the Island where kelp – essential for tackling the effects of climate change due to its ability to draw down and sequester atmospheric carbon – is thriving, on a national scale it is in retreat; pushed out by invasive alien species brought over on the bottom of container ships and cruise liners. 

It’s not just the plant life that’s changing in volume and distribution. Ed reels off more proof points: mackerel that is coming earlier and earlier; crabs that are sticking around for longer; lobster larvae struggling to make it to adulthood; a superabundance of squid. 

All are symptomatic of warming seas.

Cold water cod and pollack have, he says, been replaced by volumes of warm-water silver shoaling fish: bass, bream, and mullet are loved by dolphins and porpoises alike. 

Suddenly, as if summoned, there they were.

The boat slows and Ed shuts down the engine. He gestures up ahead to where, if I squint, I can see a splash in the sparkle. They see us, and the next thing I know there are dolphins on either side of the boat. All is silent as I regain my balance, reach for my phone, and watch.

We are as close to the sun as we’ll be all year and I am as close to dolphins as I have ever been. It is a precise planetary moment. My next thought is less poetic: they are huge. I am not completely unaccustomed to large animals – our family dog is a Great Dane. Nevertheless, these dolphins were truly, mind-blowingly, massive. Perhaps I had been using my dead porpoise as a reference point, which I had judged at the time to be roughly Red Setter sized. In any case, these cetaceans were more like cows jumping over the waves. They are dipping and diving and doing all the things you might imagine a pod of dolphins to do, only somehow more magical and more meaningful in real-time than in any video.  

After my boat trip, I am adrift and agog. Seeing them ‘IRL’ has elevated the concept of my dead porpoise from corpse to corporeal. She was here. In an attempt to regain creative focus, I take the kids on a spur-of-the-weekend camping trip. Hardly a writer’s retreat, but a change of scenery at least. We stay in a tipi, tucked away in the private nursery area behind Ventnor Botanic Gardens. Since I left the magazine, I haven’t been to Ventnor in six months – now I am back for the second time in a week. 

The site is surrounded by subtropical plants that thrive outdoors and unprotected thanks to the Mediterranean-like microclimate of the Ventnor Undercliff: huge spiky agaves, giant echiums, palm trees, and Australian eucalyptus. Unpacking our blow-up mattress while they chase each other round the tent, I notice two curious eyes watching me as I struggle with the foot pump. A gecko. Growing up on a compound in the semi-desert suburbs of Saudi Arabia, I am not shocked. They are as familiar sight in Ventnor as they were in my own childhood. Following the controversial reintroduction of chemical weedkiller Glyphosate by Island Roads in 2021 – a decision defended by the Isle of Wight Council – residents successfully launched a campaign to temporarily halt its use. One small win for locals and lizards. 

The creature gives me one last look and runs up the central pole, but not before I have snapped a blurry photo to show the boys. They are disappointed to have missed it, so I suggest we give him a name. For reasons unknown, they settle on Bodhi. 

That evening, as they watch Peppa Pig in bed and I return to the tangled tale that is starting to take shape in my head, I decide that my porpoise, too, deserves a name. “Oink oink” says the iPad. That settles it then – A Porpoise Named Peppa. 

My choice is validated the next day by remote acoustics analyst Theo Vickers. A recent marine biology graduate, Theo spends his working days trawling hours of underwater sound data to distinguish between whale and submarine. He shares my intense interest in cetacean strandings and has been mapping them since he was fourteen. “I was a bit of a strange teenager” he says, by way of explanation. 

As we walk – and talk – past fields of roan and white cattle and onto the wooden steps down towards Woody Bay, I relay the previous evening’s naming ceremony. “Etymologically, porpoise literally means 'pig-fish' – probably because it makes this little pig-like puff at the surface of the water” he explains. I squeal with anthropomorphic excitement at the aptness of it. “Perfect!” he says. 

Picking a comfortable-looking rock to perch on, I give him the potted history of my discoveries so far. I am very relieved that he doesn’t look at me like I’m crazy when I mention that I first thought of my porpoise as a murder victim. “I mean, there definitely has been that misuse of cetaceans – Sea Shepherd documented evidence that some commercial trawlers even use dolphins as bait. In some cultures, fishermen must mutilate dolphins as part of an initiation ritual and bleed them out to attract sharks for sport fishing.” 

He is particularly interested in the changes in fishing stock observed by the local fishermen at Ventnor Haven: “That’s a pretty good sign that the seas are warming up” he says. I show Theo my video, and he confirms that they are classic Bottlenose dolphins (like Flipper), part of a bigger ‘super-pod’ population that is primarily focused in South-West England.  These sightings are becoming more and more common in our waters, he says, because “their prey is becoming less predictable, and so groups are having to search bigger distances to find food.” 

I ask Theo what he thinks are the main impacts of climate change on the Island. “I think it’s the unpredictability of everything,” he says.

Ocean acidification, too, which will directly impact cetacean health, is likely to already be taking place in the English Channel. “It will affect different parts of the ocean disproportionately, but generally speaking high latitude temperate to polar waters are predicted to experience the biggest PH changes over time. That absolutely includes the Solent.” 

Alongside his job, Theo is an underwater photographer and runs guided family-friendly fossil hunting experiences. When I get to the part about zoonotic risk, his eyes alight with the tell-tale look of someone who has, well, a tale to tell. “We had a dead porpoise at Atherfield. I thought ‘I’ll show the kids in this family, that’s quite an interesting thing that you don’t see very often – especially if you’re from London.’ I was talking to the parents and I turned around and the kids had put their hands in the putrefied organs in the body cavity. It was horrific. Really they should have had professional decontamination afterwards – imagine all the pathogens. Honestly, it was beyond belief, absolutely beyond belief.” 

I pray that neither of my two would do that. But still, kids will be kids, and the gruesome anecdote serves as a further reminder of the importance of swift and effective public health measures.

Eighteen months after our first meeting on St. Helens beach, I visit Garry Oates at home in Sandown. I get a bit lost walking up and down side streets and call for directions. He beckons me back towards the council-owned car park where a car boot sale is being set up and welcomes me in through a side gate to a courtyard: Blue Seas Protection HQ. 

Garry introduces me to his partner, Sue Betts. We retire to the conservatory, where the specimens in jars – razor clams, shark cases, bladderwrack, and whelk egg clouds – remind me of a Potteresque potions store.

Files and folders are brought out, containing press cuttings, correspondence, and campaign documents. Their work to protect the sea and its inhabitants is tireless – and feels, I get the impression, at times fruitless. Frustrations are aired and aired again: about the lack of government action, the antipathy of authority. We sit in a conservatory on the Isle of Wight and lament the loss of marine life the world over.

Over a second coffee, I learn that Sue, who grew up in New Zealand, is from a long line of European whalers; Garry from a family of marine salvagers. I wonder if, on some level, these dual histories in ocean extraction have driven their life of environmental activism. As my eyes trace the contents of the glass containers, it occurs to me that my own childhood proximity to Middle Eastern oil and gas may have similarly prompted the path that I am now on.

I break from my thoughts and thank them for their time. “Thank you, Emma – for fighting for our oceans,” he says, showing me back into the Sandown sun. 

During those first few weeks, before school and nursery are officially ‘out’, I finally have the headspace to revisit the stories of those I have met and spoken to along the way.

I remember Nigel Dove, the volunteer marine mammal medic, telling me about the time he helped load half a fin whale stranded on a sandbank between Seagrove Bay and Bembridge – with visible wounds from a ship’s propellor – onto a truck bound for Lynbottom rubbish tip. My cousin in Ireland shares memories of Fungie, the much-loved Dingle Dolphin who went missing in October 2020 – now presumed dead. I speak to a lady in Totland who once swam with a solitary (and sexually aggressive) dolphin called Georges at Compton Bay and another who remembers Daisy the Dolphin at St. Helens. Somebody tells me they remember there being a dolphinarium in Sandown in the 1970s, set in a disused lido, prompting a diversionary afternoon spent at the Isle of Wight records office peeling through press cuttings now blue tacked to my living room door.

Theo Vickers was the “little boy that read books about sharks” and Ed Blake the child who “had every single model of every single dolphin out there.”

Who knows what my boys will make of the summer that their mum was obsessed with a porpoise named Peppa.

For two years I have waded through the Island's waters in search of answers. Yet each investigative turn raises only weeds, exposing underwater tributaries beneath what I had once thought the sea floor. The current that has carried me onwards must surely slow soon. I crave conclusion. 

On the 17th September 2022 I go looking for seaglass in an attempt to find closure in the complexity. 

As the country mourns a monarch, I mourn a mammal – one of her own, a Royal Fish. Just as details of Queen Elizabeth II's official cause of death will remain private, the specific circumstances around how Peppa the Porpoise came to wash up at my feet on St. Helens beach two years ago will never be known. She may have become entangled, and then confused, and then sick. It may have been the other way around. Her home may have slowly become a place she no longer recognised – too noisy, too polluted, too warm. Each possible cause of death can be directly or indirectly traced back to us. Our ancestral anthropogenic actions.

Telling her story is both a rallying call to change and a simple act of remembrance.

This piece of hyperlocal 'climate and community' journalism was originally submitted as part of my MA Journalism Final Major Project at Falmouth University.

With thanks to the following for their advice, support, comment and contributions:

Ed Blake, Ventnor Haven Fishery; Sandy Chamberlain, Citizens Advice UK (also: mum and childcare provider); Kit Chapman, Course Leader MA Journalism, Falmouth University; Madeleine Cuff, Environment correspondent, The i Paper; Rob Deaville, Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme; Kate De Pury, EBU Moscow; Ahmed Elobeid, Met Police (also: husband and sage sounding board); Professor Andrew Knight, University of Winchester; The London Writers’ Salon Community; Robin McInnes, Coastal Geologist; Wyl Menmuir, Writer in Residence, Falmouth University; Jane Nash and Dan Milne, Narrativ London; Garry Oates and Susan Betts, Blue Seas Protection; Jane Qiu, Science Journalist; Tansy Robertson-Fall, Senior Editor, Ellen MacArthur Foundation; Emily Stroud, Hampshire & Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust; Anita Varma, School of Journalism and Media, University of Texas; Theo Vickers, British Antarctic Survey; Naomi White, British Divers Marine Life Rescue