SATURDAY, 4 March 2017

Tour at 13:00

Report from Eldey: Still enjoying this period of excellent sun, we left with joy and confidence, eager to see again the cetaceans from this morning. The usual safety speech was cut short as after 15 min of sailing we came across a pod of white-beaked dolphins. It was hard to estimate their number as they surfaced twice before vanishing into thin air. Following that was a long but enjoyable searching in the bay under majestic afternoon lights. We went far West, sailed up to North and came back toward the East, covering a wide area. But it was not until we reached again the vicinity of Reykjavik that we met another pod of dolphins. They were about 6-7 and stayed only few minutes with us. But they approached us enough to allow us to identify Sophie, one of our regulars among the white-beaked dolphins. Slightly disappointed by the shortness of the encounter, we were treated with a third pod of dolphins only a couple of miles away the harbour. This time they were a dozen, surfacing all around us, and so so slowly ! We could then easily take pictures and enjoy them to the fullest. Our difficult searching ended on a bright note with splendid white-beaked dolphins lit by a warm sun.

- Guillaume Calcagni

Tour at 09:00

Report from Eldey: In quite good sea conditions we sailed out this morning, with the sun starting to rise above the city. After just some minutes we came across a group of ca. 6 white-beaked dolphins. They were swimming around very close to Reykjavik and even headed further into the fjord during the encounter. Sometimes they surfaced just meters away from us so everyone was able to get a close look at this beautiful dolphin species. In the end they sped up a lot and we struggeled to keep up with them. We watched them for a while traveling next to us creating a lot of splashes until we decided to leave them alone and head further out. After a while our Captain spotted a minke whale in some distance but unfortunately we never saw it again and continued our search. Then another boat informed us about a minke whale and lucklily this individual stayed a bit in the area. Still it wasn't making it easy for us, and we needed to be patient until we saw the minke whale surfacing twice about 250m away from us before going for a dive. We wanted to get a bit closer and waited for it to come back to the surface and after just 2 min or so it surfaced about 100 m away and we could see it twice again. Because we were running out of time, we could not spend much longer with the animal but hopefully everyone caught a glimpse of it. 

- Hanna Michel

Bird species seen on today's tours include: northern gannet, northern fulmar, common guillemot, lesser black-backed gull, glaucous gull, cormorant, and eider ducks.