TUESDAY, 23 MAY 2017

Tour at 17:00

Report from Elding: Sea conditions were a little bit calmer and greater than the previous tour, but during almost all the tour we had to face an annoying light rain. We went straight away to the area in which we last saw t hat breaching humpback, but soon we had to stop ourselves because a pod of 3-4 white beaked dolphins crossed our path! Since they were coming towards us we believed we were going to enjoy them for a while but unfortunately they ran away as sneakily as they appeared. We resumed our way encountering a few harbour porpoises now and then (with a total of around 10 different individuals, and then, finally, we encountered the whales. The minke whales though! We had a pretty good gaze of at least 3 different individuals, and one of them was even feeding on the surface not even 40 meters away from our boat! Then we put our sight into finding that humpback, and we believe we did... but unfortunately we could only see a couple of big blows really really far away. So, maybe it wasn't as incredible as the previous tours but still we got to see something very special up close - a feeding minke whale!

- Alberto Alejandro

Tour at 13:00

Report from Hafsulan: After incredible morning we left the harbour in good moods, hoping for good afternoon trip. It was warm and sunny so all passengers were enjoying this beautiful weather staying outside. Very soon we met our first pod of 6 - 10 White-Beaked Dolphins. Animal were disappearing for diving quiet often, changing directions, but still all of our guests were able to take some photos of these beautiful animals.  Few minutes later we encounter another 3 - 4 dolphins, which were traveling fast, so we decided to leave them alone. It was a good decision to continue sailing without stopping, because not long later we spotted the same Humpback Whale, which we saw this morning! This time this giant presented us even better show: he not only continued with fin and tail slapping but also breached! Animal made few incredible and gracefully jumps out of water, so we could enjoy view for the whale from his snout to the end of his fluke! What an amazing day!

- Ewa Malinowska

Tour at 09:00

Report from Hafsulan: Too make it short: we had an amazing tour this morning! The sun was shining and the sea looked like a mirror. Simply perfect. Our first cetacean species today was a minke whale! We first saw it about 200 m away but then approached it a bit and waited for it to resurface. Luckily, we got a pretty close look at it as it surfaced just about 60 m away from us after a few minutes and took several breaths before going for a deep dive again. We were able to spend some more minutes with this cute minke, before we moved an got to see two white-beaked dolphins. There was a group of them further in the distance but the ones close to us were traveling as a couple and did not seem to be disturbed by having a lot of happy passengers looking at them! On our way to the dolphins, we got some nice but short looks at 3-4 harbour porpoises passing by as well Taking advantage of the ideal sea conditions we had today, we moved on again and after a while of sailing saw a a big blow and a dark back appearing in the distance -  a humpback whale! This individual made our day: When we got a bit closer we saw it pec-slapping (slapping its pectoral fins or flippers on the water surface), tail-slapping and lobtailing and still staying close to us all the time. It was a wonderful 30 min we had with this humpback whale until we had to start our way back to the harbour.

- Hanna Michel

Bird species seen on today‘s tours include: northern gannet, northern fulmar, kittiwakes, lesser black-backed gull, arctic tern, arctic skua, atlantic puffin, razorbill, common guillemot and eider ducks.

Status: RUNNING

We are sailing out from the Old Harbour in Reykjavik today. It is sunny but just a little wind coming from the East.