Saturday, 23 November 2024

• CLASSIC WHALE TOUR | 9:00
• CLASSIC WHALE TOUR | 13:00

Report from Eldey: This morning, we were very lucky to have nice calm seas to sail in and as we left the harbour, we were treated to a long and beautiful sunrise for almost the whole duration of the tour. We decided to sail directly to where we had had successful tours for the last couple of days. After reaching the area, and enjoying amazing views of the newly erupting volcano, we were surprised by two big splashes out in front of us! It was a humpback whale breaching! We had to wait for a few minutes for it to resurface but when it did, it had a friend and we saw that it was actually 2 humpback whales travelling together. Fo the rest of our tour we were able to watch the two whales swimming around our boat and just before we had to leave to head back home, they came up right next to us! So close that we could see their whole bodies! A perfect start to the day.

- Emily Erskine

Report from Eldey: This morning we sailed out once more to see what the bay would have in store for us. We went back to Hafnarfjordur and from a distance spotted 2 blows! We got a bit closer and saw the same two humpback whales! They came up quite close to us multiple times and then started feeding sycronised! This is not a behaviour we see here often so was very exciting to see. We saw it a few more times before sadly time was up and we had to start heading home, as we started our return journey the coastguard called us and asked us to come over and have a closer look at their ship which was testing their water hoses. We got a 360 close up view and took lots of pictures for them! In that moment we also saw 3 harbour porpoises and one mystery cetacean. It could very likely be another porpoise but the behaviour felt more like a minke whale, however this time of year that would be odd. It was at a weird angle and in the distance so tricky to say what exactly we were encountering at the end. We did however run out of time, so could not stay longer to investigate. On the way home we now had amazing views of the mountain, a setting sun and the volcano in the background.

- Anna Richter

glaucous gull, Iceland gull, great cormorant, European shag, black legged kittiwake, eider duck, black ad common guillemot, herring gull, great and lesser black backed gull