Monday, 28 September 2015

Tour at 13:00

Report from Eldey: During the tour we had a light rain showering us from start to end. Good thing that our overalls that we offer all passengers kept us dry. Other than rain we had an overcast sky and medium swells. We wanted to head straight out towards the area where we left "Nettie" the humpback whale from the morning tour. Before we got there we came across two pods of white-beaked dolphins. The first pod with 4-5 dolphins was quite elusive and didn't show themselves very well. The second pod contained 5-6 individuals and was a little nicer to us. When we reached the area we could not relocated "Nettie", we searched for a long time and could ad one more pod of 5 dolphins and a very elusive minke whale to the tour list. But no humpback. On our way back we had another two pods of dolphins with 5 and 4-5 individuals. In harbour we could sum up a rainy tour with a lot of dolphins, not to bad in this weather!

- Marcus Bergström

Tour at 09:00

Report from Eldey: Our morning tour started off with a slight rain and an overcast sky above us. Luckily, the rain stopped after about half an hour, and after another while we spotted a shy minke whale right in front of us. Unfortunately, not many passengers got to see it since it only surfaced three times before going for a dive and vanishing. So we moved on and soon learned about more cetaceans spotted further offshore from another vessel. That's where we made out way to and were rewarded with a group of white-beaked dolphins (7-8 individuals) leaping around a humpback whale. We immediately identified the humpback whale as Nettie, the beloved humpback that had been entangled in a fishing net and freed by an international disentanglement team from the UK and US earlier this summer. We hadn't seen Nettie again after she was freed, so we are excited to see her (or him) paying us another visit in Faxaflói. However, Nettie spent a long time under water so our passengers needed to be quite patient to get a good look at this humpback before we headed back to the harbour. 

- Hanna Michel

Birds seen on todays tour include: gannets, fulmars, kittiwakes, greater black-backed gull, lesser black-backed gull, glaucous gull, sooty shearwater, manx shearwater, great skua, arctic tern (2, maybe the last ones for the season), eider duck, shag, cormorant and black-headed gulls.