Saturday, 13 May 2023

Today we will be operating on Þruma RIB for our 10:00, 12:00 and 14:00 Premium Whale tours and on our lovely vessel Eldey for the 09:00 and 13:00 Classic Whale Watching tours. Make sure to dress appropriately for the tours as it is always colder on sea than on land. 

• CLASSIC WHALE TOUR | 09:00
• PREMIUM WHALE TOUR | 10:00
• PREMIUM WHALE TOUR | 12:00
• CLASSIC WHALE TOUR | 13:00
• PREMIUM WHALE TOUR | 14:00

Report from Eldey: The weather was grey and overcast with a promise of rain later on and the high swell rocked our boat gently back and forth. We sailed out into the bay and it took us quite some time to find something. The vast ocean looked bleak but then a blow in the distance got us excited! It was a humpback whale! This one immediately went down with a fantastic fluke dive and never showed up again. While we waited and waited for this humpy to appear again we got a quick glimpse of another species of whale, a minke whale! This smaller baleen whale was very sneaky and we only saw it pop up once. We decided to circle the area because there were a lot of feeding  seabird around, which is always a good sign. And the we saw it a humpback whales blow, and a second one. Two humpbacks in the vicinity. Both went down with their flukes up and the next time we saw one of the whales it came up very close on the side of our boat. We got a very good and close look of this one. The same whale continued to pop up on each side and taking deep dives. Likely this individual was feeding on the same food as the birds were feasting on. What a cool sighting!

- Cindy Schwenk

Arctic tern, eider duck, herring gull, cormorant; Arctic skua, lesser black-backed gull, great black backed gull, Kittiwake, common gull, razorbill, common guillemot, northern fulmar, northern gannet and Atlantic puffin

Report from Eldey: We set our course on a lovely Icelandic day with a bit of wind and some rain in the horizon, but nothing could move us from not going to see some whales! We had some nice sightings in the morning so our hopes were really high for the afternoon. After almost an hour we had our first sighting of the day, a small pod of harbour porpoises bow riding and disappearing in the next second. Not even five minutes after this we saw 1 humpback whale swimming parallel to us and in the same direction, this sighting was first made by a passenger, thus the importance of being very focused on the ocean surface. After that we saw a blow from another humpback whale not too far and on its side a minke whale! They were feeding together with a small flock of birds! Such an amazing day but the weather got worse and the time was up, so the captain decided to call it a day and what a day it was!

- Pedro Teixeira