Sunday, 5 April 2009

Tour at 13:00

The rain stopped and the sun came out, the wind calmed down almost completely, very good whale watching conditions. We knew it might be difficult to find the humpback again, but we tried. It wasn't any longer where we left it in the morning. We decided to search farther out in Faxaflói bay and all of a sudden, we saw some splashes far away. White-beaked dolphins! And guess what, they jumped a lot while we watched them, what's more very close to the boat, which they don't do often. They were funny and active animals and their behaviour was very entertaining. We enjoyed them a lot. But we kept thinking about the humpback and left the dolphins after a good while. To be honest, they made it rather difficult for us to leave them. We searched and searched far out in Faxafloi bay, until one passenger suddenly shouted: a blow!!! We found the humpback! We could barely believe that in all of Faxaflói Bay we had sailed right to it. However, it was a bit lazy this afternoon and always dived for a long long time. But we were patient and got a few good views of its tail and admired its huge blow a lot. But that wasn't everything, we had even more luck (even if it doesn´t sound like it): Just when we wanted to turn back to the harbour, a seal appeared. It swam quietly beside the boat and watched us in exactly the same way as we were watching it!! For us this seal was the day's real star because we almost never get to see seals!!!

 

Tour at 9:00

We started the day and the tour with some rain and sailed towards Hafnarfjörður. Soon we spotted some harbour porpoises and while we waited for them to show up again the humpback whale breached in the distance!!! No question we had to to go there and so we left the "poor" harbour porpoises which suddenly weren't interesting any longer. The humpback made it easy for us to to get close without losing it: it breached and breached and breached!!! This was a spectacular show! And it kept on breaching once we were close to it. After a little while however it seemed to be trying to get rid of us. It started diving for longer and always came up a bit further away. We respected the whale's will and kept on searching. We found something else: a playful group of white-beaked dolphins! They were breaching and jumping too -- there must have been something in the air today!! A fantastic morning tour!