Tour at 13:00
Report from Eldey:The wind was much stronger on this tour and it rained a lot on us for the first half hour of the tour. We traveled over very lively areas with big flocks of birds but no cetaceans were to be seen. Finally after about 2 hours our first mate GulliS spotted a blow few hundred meters away from us. We got closer and saw this was minke whale. It was quite elusive, it always spent a long time under water and only put a small part of its body up to the surface. We were able to follow that minke for nearly 20 minutes so everyone got to see the whale at least few times.
-Sigurlaug Sigurðardóttir
Tour at 09:00
Report from Eldey: We went out from Reykjavík again and, luckily, the sea had calmed down a lot since yesterday afternoon. There were still quite a few white caps there but not a lot of swell that could give us a hard time. After about an hour we spotted 2 minke whales not even 100 m apart from each other. They started heading towards opposite directions, so we followed the minke whale that was a bit closer to us which turned out to be the right choice because it surfaced a few times only about 30 m away from us. We followed it for a while as it headed towards Reykjavík before it disappeared in between the waves. While we waited for it to resurface, a pod of 7-8 harbour porpoises popped up about 50 m in front of our boat and then raced along our side. It was great to see these cute little animals out of nowhere and showing themselves for a longer while than usual as they tend to be really shy. Since we lost the minke whale, we headed back towards the area to look for second minke and found it still there. It stayed a bit further away from us than the first but still everyone could see it very well before we started our way back to the harbour. On the way, we got to see another minke whale that surfaced twice next to us.
- Hanna Michel
Bird species seen on today's tours include: northern gannets, northern fulmars, Great northern diver, long tailed duck, kittiwakes, black-backed gulls, Iceland gulls, black headed gulls, glaucous gulls, eider ducks and common guillemots.