Sunday, 6 March 2016

Status: RUNNING

We will be sailing out from Keflavik today, taking our passengers by bus from the old harbour to Keflavik. On the whale watching tour yesterday we saw humpback whales and fin whales along with an amazing wildlife. Hopefully today will be just as great.  Please add an extra 1 1/2 to 2 hours to your whale watching tour to account for bus transfers. The forecast predicts a wind from the west and some swells. 

Tour at 13:00

Report from Eldey: The weather was beautiful when we sailed out from Keflavík, sunny and smooth because the Reykjanes peninsula provided us shelter from the swells. After 30 minutes we found our first humpback whale. Soon after we found it we were hit by a snow storm that reduced our visibility to about 300 meters and that made it challenging to follow the animal. Luckily for us it more or less stayed in the same area so we never lost sight of it until it cleared up. We got a call from another boat about two humpbacks traveling together so we went to have a look at them. These whales were also milling slowly like the our first humpback so we all got good looks at them when they surfaced slowly together. While watching these humpbacks the visibility over the bay was incredible and we could spot more blows from animals much further out. Then we suddenly spotted strong blows that caught our interest, these were strong and narrower blows so we wanted to check out if this was another species. We followed these blows far out on the bay so we lost shelter from land and the swells got much higher. Unfortunately this animal was on high speed, it kept going further and further out on the bay so we were never able to get close enough to see what it was before we ran out of time. On our way back to land we saw two humpback whales that we spent a short time with. 

-Sigurlaug Sigurðardóttir

Tour at 09:00

Report from Eldey: We had moved the boat to Keflavík this morning and went out from there today. The weather changed a lot today from snow to sunshine and the wind was from west. We could sail in shelter from the peninsula so the boat remained fairly stable throughout the tour. We searched towards the tip of the peninsula and had only sailed for less than 20 minutes when the first humpback whale of the tour surfaced very close to us! We could observe this humpback for another two surface sequences but soon decided to head on because it was a bit difficult spending long time under water. We joined another whale watching boat that saw a smaller humpback but very friendly and was just milling close to the surface. It may actually have been sleeping from time to time. After viewing this humpback for some time we continued out. Soon we could see fins coming up infront of us, dolphins! This was a huge pod of maybe 30-35 white-beaked dolphins! Wonderful to see some dolphins again it has mainly been whales lately. The dolphins were amazing jumping now and then and coming really close to the boat and even swimming under it. We could also see the third humpback of the tour before leaving the area and heading back to Keflavík. On our way back some dolphins followed us in our waves, an amazing tour this morning!

- Marcus Bergström

Bird species seen on todays tours include: northern gannet, northern fulmar, "blue fulmar", greater black-backed gull, Iceland gull, glaucous gull, razorbill and eider duck.