Tuesday, 26 April 2016

Tour at 13:00

Report from Eldey: The weak winds and perfect sea condition continued on the afternoon tour, that also got lovely sunshine during the whole tour. So the conditions for whale watching were perfect and we all could enjoy the smooth sailing out to the "hot spot" further out in the bay. Just like this morning and previous days we had a lot of activity in one area with humpback whales, minke whales and harbour porpoises feeding! We could first see the big blow from a humpback whale when we got closer and then it was suddenly two whales! At the same time a minke whale was surface feeding behind us. We went to see the minke better and ended up seeing 3-4 minke whales in the area and they came really close on several occasions. We also had the porpoises around us and we manage to see around 10-15 of them on the tour. Before we searched further out we got excellent views of the humpback going for deeper dives raising the fluke high as it went down into the deep. We constantly had many bird species around us, various types of seagulls, puffins and gannets. A bit further out we saw another individual humpback, it went for one dive and we couldn't see it surface again. When we had turned around we saw one of the humpbacks we left earlier again AND the one that had gone for a deeper dive now started BREACHING behind us! We could see the whale throw its body out of the water several times in row in some distance. A very nice end to the tour and we returned to harbour with the sun in our backs! 

- Marcus Bergström

Tour at 09:00

Report from Eldey: We sailed out on a warm but overcast day, with beautifully flat seas and very little wind. After about 20 minutes a large pod of harbour porpoises were spotted, this normally elusive species were giving us a beautiful show and coming up many times really close to the boat. A minke whale was spotted further out in the distance as well as a humpback whale. The large blow from this animal could be seen even though we were fairly far away. As we got closer we got lovely views of this animals as it surfaced multiple times really close to the boat. A few minke whales then surfaced in the distance so we went to have a look at those. They circled around us and came wonderfully close, allowing us a really close look. We then spotted another 6 more minkes in different directions and a further two humpback whales and even more harbour porpoises. As we started to head back a pod of 6 white-beaked dolphins were spotted and were playing and jumping just in front of the boat. It was a really amazing tour, with so many animals in every direction.     

- Tess Hudson

Bird species seen on todays tours include: Atlantic puffins, northern fulmars, northern gannets, kittiwakes, Iceland gulls, herring gulls, common gulls, glaucous gulls, eider ducks, arctic skuas, lesser and greater black-backed gulls and common Guillemot.