Tour at 17:00
The swell was less in the evening and the rain had cleared up. It was pretty difficult searching for whales though, no birds were in sight and we didn't spot much of interest. One lone minke whale was all we saw, and it only surfaced twice. In the nick of time we spotted splashes on the surface - it was a group of beautiful white beaked dolphins, and they were heading our way! The were so great, bow-riding, jumping and being awesome. Then we spotted a tiny minke whale calf! We have seen a couple of minke calves, but this one was the smalles we've seen this season. It approached us like the dolphins, and swam several circles around the boat, surfacing several times. It seemed very curious. We stayed there for a while, enjoying the sightings, until we had to head back to the harbour.
Tour at 13:00
It was still a bit rainy in the afternoon but we got sunshine,too! On this tour we got to watch several minke whales. They were all feeding at the same place a few seabirds were feeding, among them some beautiful gannets. Despite waves we were able to enjoy the whales a lot, especially the ones which we had very close to the boat. I guess we spotted 6 or 7 minke whales. Close to the end of the tour we left the minke whales to find some other species, but we weren't lucky with that. We didn't mind because we were satisfied with having had all the nice minke whales around before.
Tour at 9:00
The weather was grey and wet this morning and the swell rocked the boat on the way out on Faxaflói. When we got out there we found an area with feeding birds and soon spotted a couple of nice minke whales. Then we spotted a big blow and saw a fluke being raised about 500 meters from us. A humpback whale! We sailed towards it and were able to spot it several times, coming up to the surface breathing and lunge-feeding. It was a very nice sighting. We have seen this individual before, we recognized it as our "Flower" or "Hippy Humpback", because it has a very distinctive flower-shaped pattern on the tail stock. Then we were joined by two minke whales and saw them pretty well too. At the end of the tour we sailed to another area in search of dolphins, but didn't find any. That was ok though, we were more than pleased with our beautiful minkes and humpback :-)