Monday, 21 september 2015

Tour at 13:00

Report from Eldey: The bay greeted us with the same beautiful weather as this morning. Sunshine and very little wind made it to a pleasure journey out in Faxaflói. The first cetacean of the tour proved to be a single harbour porpoise followed by a pod of 4 very elusive white-beaked dolphins. We soon lost them and had just traveled a short distance before 6 more dolphins were found in front of us. A little more cooperative than the last pod, but still difficult dolphins. Far away in the distance, our "top of the class humpback whale spotter" (yes, he forced me to write this) researcher Alberto. Found a big blow from a whale. So we headed that way. Then some dolphins started jumping behind us and we couldn't´t resist turning back to have a great look at a fairly large pod of 8-10 dolphins scattered in an area. That meant the other whale watching boats got to the big whale before us and they could confirm that it truly was a humpback whale! When we caught up with the whale we saw that it was "Mr. Square" an old friend of us seen for example in 2012. We could have great views of the humpback when it surfaced between going for deeper dives probably traveling. At the end it raised it´s fluke waving goodbye to us! A perfect ending of our tour. On the way back we encountered 2 minke whales in the distance as we traveled passed them and another elusive pod of 3 dolphins and 4-5 harbour porpoises. Really amazing tour with sunshine and a humpback whale visiting us in the bay!

- Marcus Bergström

Tour at 09:00

Report from Eldey: This was a beautiful morning, the sun was shining and the we got a great visibility around the bay. It didn't take us long to find a pod of 4-5 white beaked dolphins. They gave us a good show while they were feeding with northern gannets. There were splashes everywhere, both from the plunging gannets and the feeding dolphins. After we left that area we soon found another pod of 4-5 white beaked dolphins, they came towards us and swam around our boat! Another whale watching boat told us about a minke whale that we went to check out. We got a good look at it while it surfaced few times within 150 meters distance. On our way back we saw the largest group of dolphins 9-11 individuals. There is clearly a lot of life in the bay today.

- Sigurlaug Sigurðardóttir

Birds seen on todays tours include: northern gannets, northern fulmars, kittiwakes and black-backed gulls.