Sunday, 12 November 2023

Today we will be operating on our lovely vessel Eldey for the 09:00 and 13:00  Classic Whale Watching tours. Make sure to dress appropriately for the tours as it is always colder on sea than on land.

• CLASSIC WHALE TOUR | 9:00
• CLASSIC WHALE TOUR | 13:00

Report from Eldey: we started sailing out this morning and watched the sunrise, creating a pinkish pattern behind the mountains. The sea was fairly calm and we started exploring the area of Videy island, where we spotted our first animal: a humpback whale that, when we got closer to it, we realized it was Flak the humpy! Flak was super calm on the surface, feeding and then logging for a bit, getting some rest. It was a bit unpredictable with its surfacings when going for deeper dives, so at one point it popped up very close to us! The loud blow got us off guard and we could see it very close to us in the front! After spending a while more with this one, we decided to explore other areas in the bay, but we didn't have to wait long to see another one in the area! We spotted another blow in the distance, but before coming closer to this another humpback, we got to see a pod of at least 7 harbour porpoises very close travelling. We got to the second whale and the pod of porpoises followed it, staying very close to the whale while they feed together with the birds. An amazing way to end our tour as we were running out of time and needed to start heading back to Reykjavík.

- Milla Brandão

Report from Eldey: We couldn't have asked for a better tour! We sailed out, cool strong winds in our face again - and within 15min of leaving the harbour: Flak breached! Flak is the humpback whale, that is currently feasting very close to Reykjavik harbour. Flak breached three times, and then calmed down quite significantly. It came quite close a few times, going for deeper dives and showing the fluke each time - sometimes very lazily, but usually very beautifully. When more boats arrived we decided to do a little loop and see what else we could find. However we didn't get very far as we quickly spotted a minke whale! This one was also very good to us, coming up extremely often and basically swimming circles around us. We stayed a bit and then decided to try further out again, we spotted one more elusive minke before heading back for one last look at Flak. This time we found the individual in the other harbour which is for cargo ships, it was lunge feeding and once again came extremely close to us. It was an amazing ending to this already amazing tour.

- Anna Richter 

great cormorant, herring gull, black backed gull, black legged kittiwake, black headed gull, glaucous gull, Iceland gull, European shag, razorbill, common guillemot