Friday, 4 March

Status: RUNNING

We will be sailing out from Sandgerði today, taking our passengers by bus from the old harbour to Sandgerði. A lot of capelin are around the area and with them come humpback whales. On the whale watching tour yesterday we saw around 50 humpback whales along with an amazing wildlife. Hopefully today will be just as great.  Please add an extra 1 1/2 to 2 hours to your whale watching tour to account for bus transfers. The forecast predicts a little wind from the west so there could be some swell and there will be a little movement on the boat because of undercurrent. 

Tour at 13:00

Report from Eldey: The weather was a little bit more miserable this afternoon, as passengers came on board the rain poured down. However, once we were out of the harbour the heavens opened and the light was incredible, rainbows came out and occasionally they were very vivid with colour. It was also amazing to have the humpback whales surfacing infront of them. It took us about 30 minutes to find our first humpback whale in the midst or a cloud of actively feeding seabirds. However, we saw blows in the distance and there was already another whale watching vessel with this individual. We were very lucky because we came to an area, quite close to land were we found 3 humpbacks and they were lunge feeding and rolling, bubble feeding and once brought up their beautiful big fluke. The whole experience was breath-taking with the light, rainbows, feeding seabirds and active humpbacks. An experience not to forget. 

- Megan Whittaker

Tour at 09:00

Report from Eldey: The skies were overcast this morning and the sea conditions were fun with the big rolling swells, which were amazing to see break in the shallow waters. We were hoping to see blows soon after leaving the harbour but it took us a little while before we saw our first humpback whale. It suddenly popped up after 10 minutes of sailing. This individual was travelling and was not in the best whale watching mood, we call these the grumpy humpies. So after a while of waiting for the humpback to go for long dives we decided to travel further to the south because we heard from a fisherman that he saw lots of blows close to him. After 20 minutes of sailing we saw a blow on our left, then another, then another. We had three humpback whales in this area. The birds also started to feed and the whales too. One of the humpback whales was very small, maybe around 10m long and it was sad to see that this animal had some fishing net around the tail, this didn't hinder it's ability to feed though. It was lovely to watch the whales and birds feed and the morning light also become quite beautiful too. 

- Megan Whittaker

Bird species seen on todays tours include: northern gannet, northern fulmar, shag, glaucous gull, Iceland gull, greater black-backed gull, kittiwake, herring gull, razorbill and eider duck.