Sunday, 19 July 2015

Tour at 20:30

Report from Elding: The story of the day has been the rough weather and sea conditions and this tour was no exception, more of the same high winds and swell making for another difficult yet exciting tour that evokes many memories of our winters here in Faxaflói. We got to enjoy the sunset throughout the tour as it constantly changed the appearance of the sky and landscape around us as the evening wore on. During the tour we had two sightings of what was probably the same minke whale, once at the beginning and once at the end. It was a big surprise at the start as is appeared just 50m from us without warning and then disappeared. The sighting at the end was a little better as we could see it at some distance but when we got closer it unfortunately disappeared again. Due to the poor sightings of this whale we decided to hand out complimentary tickets at the end of tour to give our passengers 2 years to try their luck again on another whale watching tour, hopefully in better weather than this!

- Jack Ball

Tour at 17:00

Report from Hafsúlan: The conditions were still very windy as we left the port. We had some very brave passengers endure the strong winds in the front of the boat. Eventually after some great views of seabirds we managed to get a few quick glimpses of a minke whale. Luckily this was when we had the winds behind us so it was much calmer for us. We were pressed for time so we turned back and made our way slowly to the port. Not far from the islands we had another minke whale which stayed at the surface a lot longer. A difficult tour but we lucked out and found our minke whales. Hopefully this wind will calm down for tomorrow. 

- Tommy Torrades

Tour at 14:00

Report from Hafsúlan: This afternoon we went out again, hoping for the wind to calm down, and indeed it did, even though it was only a little bit. We decided to continue our search for cetaceans in areas we didn't look in the morning. After a still pretty rough ride our luck changed when we encountered a humpback whale!!! This very small individual, only around 7-8 meters in length seemed to be traveling. We followed it for a while, until it started to feed close to the surface. Unfortunately by that time we were already running out of time. We gave it a few more minutes to get a last look at the animal, especially when it was surfacing very close to where the boat was, less then 30 meters away. After this close encounter everybody was enjoying the not so shaky trip back to the harbour, since we were traveling with the wind.

- Michaela Buchbauer

Tour at 10:00

Report from Elding: Once again the conditions were windy and wild this morning, though this makes whale watching conditions more difficult it will never stop us from finding these whales. We followed the coast along the whale fjord Hvalfjörður and turned as we approached the town of Arkranes. This took us around 90 minutes but then we sighted a huge blow in the distance, this belonged to one of our beloved humpback whales! The same individual that we have seen for the last 3 days. Once again this whale was very calm as it was feeding in the area around the boat, swimming very close to us and even rolling around at the surface showing off its long pectoral fins as it was lunging around at the surface. It was a perfect humpback as it stayed with us for a very long time and we eventually had to leave the whale to continue feeding without us, but the magic always has to end at some point...

- Jack Ball

Tour at 09:00

Report from Hafsúlan: This mornings whale watching tour started out pretty rough. The northerly winds turned our travels into a "rollercoaster ride", but with a great few to the mountain Akrafjall, with was very beautiful in the morning sun. We went into the whale fjord for a bit to see if we could see any animals taking shelter in there, as we have seen before. But unfortunately there were no animals around, so we decided to head west. We found an area with high amount of food/fish, stayed for a while to see if there were cetaceans feeding on those fish like they did in the same area the day before. It seemed even though the sun was finally coming out for a short while, we were unlucky, no animals were spotted. This was the reason why we offered our passengers complimentary tickets, valid for two years, so they can come and try again.

- Michaela Buchbauer

Birds seen on todays tour include: kittiwakes, black-backed gulls, arctic terns, arctic skuas, northern gannets, northern fulmars, puffins, guillemots, eider ducks, great skuas, iceland gull.