Tour at 13:00
We went out for a whale watching trip in a calm, chilly and little bit foggy weather this November afternoon at 13:00 o’clock. Inevitably the calm winter climate made the atmosphere quite mystic but pleasant. Luckily, the day before we got information from the Marine Research Institute of Iceland (Hafro) about a humpback whale that recently entered the Faxaflói bay area. The reason why Hafro knew this was that this particular whale was tagged with a satellite transmitter a week ago in Eyjafjörður, which is a fjord at the NV-coast of Iceland. The researchers at Hafro are now intensively following the humpback whale’s movement and hoping it will migrate soon to the south. But their aim is to map humpback and minke whales winter grounds. At the meantime we try to use the opportunity to watch it while it’s here.
Though the fog can be interesting in its calming and mysterious ways it forces us to put an extra effort in to the search. Even though we knew the whale was somewhere around it didn’t turn out to be easy to find. While searching for the humpback we encountered several groups of very active harbor porpoises. According to their rapid coordinated swimming and change of direction within small area we could see that they were hunting, also the fact that they were heavily tailed by first year kittywakes trying to get their piece of the prey supported our suspicion. It turned out to be quite a lot of fish in this area according to the boats fish finder, but still no humpback. Or what! Suddenly the humpback’s enormous back turned up on the surface just about 300 m away from us. Shortly after that we discovered that it was accompanied by another humpback whale, so we had two of them swimming calmly around us, these approximately 11 – 15 m long giants. A whale watching trip during winter in the Norhtern hemisphere is for sure interesting experience, especially if it starts to snow. Hopefully, these winter tours can become a frequent activity in Iceland.