SATURDAY, 2 APRIL 2016

Tour at 13:00

Report from Hafsúlan and Eldey: The weather got a little worse this afternoon but the sea state stayed calm. Just a little more wind and rain. We traveled towards Hafnafjörður, about a 50 minute sail and saw our first of five humpback whales, one pair and three single humpbacks. One of them was having a lovely afternoon siesta and we watched it log, stay at the surface of the sea without moving. A tell tail sigh it was sleeping. We left this individual and slowly traveled towards the pair that were also traveling towards land, after a while, as we slowly edging closer and closer we had them surfacing just meters from the boat, you could see down their blowholes they were so close. It was amazing. After a long time with these leviathans we sailed home and found a pod of at least ten harbour porpoises which was a great bonus to end the tour on. 

-  Megan Whittaker and Hanna Michel

Tour at 09:00

Report from Eldey: We went out in perfect whale watching conditions on this sunny morning. And it only took about 15-20 minutes until we encountered a widely spread out pod of 20-25 white-beaked dolphins. In the beginning they slowly came closer towards us and played around the bow of the boat, while others we jumping out of the water a bit further away. After a while we were surrounded by these beautiful dolphins and since they were just traveling next to us, we could spend quite a while with them as we were heading further out into the bay. After another 20-30 minutes we spotted a big blow in some distance and headed over there to see the animal that had created the blow. It soon came up to the surface again and turned out to be a humpback whale. It didn´t seem to be disturbed by our presence as it seemed very relaxed and most of the time kept traveling slowly into the same direction. After everyone was able to get some nice pictures of the fluke ups when the whale went for a deeper dive, we waved good-bye to it and slowly made our way back to Reykjavík. Halfway to the harbour, another pot of white-beaked dolphins (10-15 individuals) traveled towards us at high speed and we got another good look at them before we moved on.  

- Hanna Michel

Bird species seen on today´s tour include: northern fulmars, great black-backed gulls, lesser black-backed gulls, black-headed gulls, and kittiwakes.