Tour Status: RUNNING
Tour at 13.00
Report from Elding: The afternoon-tour faced the same challenges with the weather as the morning tour did. There where long swells, which gave us a rocky boat, but there was good visibility over the bay. About half an hour after departure we saw a pod of 3-4 harbour porpoises which swam quickly by. In the horizon we spotted many northern gannets so we approached them and enjoyed the sight of the gannets hitting the water with great speed. Not far from the gannets, a pod of 3-5 harbour porpoises where feeding and we briefly saw a minke whale. We lost sightings of the whale and continued further out in the bay, where a new minke whale was spotted. We got a few nice sightings of this individual, before it also disappeared. There was definitely challenges on todays tour, but we remained optimistic and kept on searching. This payed off, when we met a humpback whale. The whale came so close to the boat, that is was easy for everyone to hear the big blow from the whale. After this nice sighting we headed back to Reykjavik.
- Mia Rasmussen
Tour at 09:00
Report from Eldey: As we sailed out it seemed to become a bit more challenging day: overcast sky, slight rain, all gray in gray. Knowing cetaceans do not care about the weather we were in high spirits as we started our tour. Quite soon everyone joined outside on the top deck, not bothering much about the starting snow and the big swells. We spotted lots of different seabirds including some northern gannets hunting, which is always spectacular to observe. It took us some time to spot cetaceans on this morning, but then it went one after the other: first we spotted a couple of harbour porpoises, but being very elusive we just kept on going. Suddenly 4 white-beaked dolphins popped out of nowhere, swimming slowly around and even leaping out of the water, showing us their full body and white beak. In the meantime we had seen already lots of porpoises, as some people on the upper deck spotted a blow of a humpback whale coming towards us, around 150m away from our boat! We got even more excited by now, unfortunately we where not able to spot the animal again, even we tried very hard but maybe it was just a "grumpy humpie". So we kept on going as another 2 dolphins crossed our path to the forth species of the day: the minke whale! We could stay with the animal for quite some time as it was surfacing around our boat in a frequent pattern and then suddenly a 2nd minke joined the fun! This was just a fantastic tour. Unfortunately we never have too much time on our tours and we had to head back to the harbour. On the entire way back we spotted again and again porpoises, probably a total of 40-50 individuals over the entire tour. What a lovely morning out in the bay, even the sun came out for a moment to say hello.
- Sarah Kompatscher
Bird species seen on todays tour include: northern fulmar, blue fulmar, northern Gannet, Atlantic puffin, common guillemot, eider duck, black legged kittiwake, great skua, greater black backed gull, arctic skua.
We are sailing out from the Old Harbour in Reykjavik today. There is some wind and will be some movement on the boat out on Faxabay so if you are sensitive to motion sickness we do have seasickness tablets free of charge at the ticket office. All our boats have inside and outside areas and to make the tour even more comfortable we provide warm overalls
