Tuesday, 12 April 2016

Tour at 13:00

Report from Eldey and Elding: Due to a large number of passengers we decided to take out two boats this afternoon. We headed out on a beautiful warm and sunny day. After a short sail we spotted a pod of 3-4 harbour porpoises, we didn´t stop for these animals as we wanted to find some larger animals however, we managed to get a beautiful look at these fairly elusive species. Eldey managed to spot a pod of 8 white beaked-dolphins. These displayed some lovely social behaviours and came really close to the boat allowing everyone on board a really close look. After watching these for a while both boats spotted a minke whale, which came up for a many surface sequences very close to the boats. A further 2 minke whales were spotted only 500 meters away. We then spotted a humpback whale further off in the distance so we went to have a closer look. We saw the humpback surface a few times but it was being fairly elusive so we went towards another humpback a bit further away. This animal also surface a few times but again was elusive and only surfacing once every 10 minute or so. Time was running out so we had to start heading back to harbour but the tour didn´t end there. We saw a further 2 pods of Harbour Porpoise and another small pod (3-4) of White Beaked Dolphins (Eldey). All in all a lovely tour good weather and great sightings.  

- Tess and Hanna

Tour at 09:00

Report from Eldey: The summer seems to have arrived early in Iceland this year, like the previous days we enjoyed the sun a lot on this whale watching tour without any winds. After about 20-25 min of sailing we came across a minke whale. Usually it takes longer for us to find cetaceans, so it was good to see a minke so early on the tour so close to land. They can be a bit difficult sometimes, but this individual always stayed within 350 m from us and often came a lot closer than that - remarkable behaviour considering that they are still hunted here in Iceland. While watching the minke, we saw many white-beaked dolphins a bit further away from us. After spending a good time with the minke, we decided to go over to the dolphins. After a few minutes we had dolphins all around us, they were just everywhere. Sometimes individuals were seen jumping or leaping out of the water, while rest just surfaced all around us. We just turned the motor off and enjoyed this encounter. Even when we moved on to go further out in to the Bay, we could see dolphins both close to us and some further away, impossible to say how many individuals we saw on this tour. We just kept going and in the end of the tour also found a humpback whale! There were probably two individuals in the area, as we could see another large blow on some distance, and another minke whale as well. We spent some time with it und got to see two nice fluke-ups before we headed back home to Reykjavík Harbour. 

- Hanna Michel

Bird species seen on todays tours include: northern gannet, northern fulmar, "blue fulmar", glaucous gull, Iceland gull, great black-backed gull, lesser black-backed gull, kittiwake, black-headed gulls, puffin!, Brent goose, shag, cormorant and eider duck.