Thursday, 24 September 2015

Tour at 13:00

Report from Eldey: The afternoon just got better and better, sun was still shining and nice crisp air to fill the lungs. A perfect day to out on the water. The searching took us longer on this tour than in the morning. After about 50 minutes we got radio call from the other company letting us know of a pod of white-beaked dolphins they found. Great! Once in the area we saw it was a pod of about 15 animals and they were incredible. Playing under and around the boat, moving inbetween each of the two vessels giving us all a suberb look. They looked to be socialising amongst themselves too, checking each other out and even copulating at times. Lots of fun. Whilst watching the dolphins we spotted a minke whale about 500 meters away. One of three that we woud see on this tour. They were more difficult but hopefully most saw them. have to be a lot more patient with the minkes lately as they are going on very long dives and always surface a good distance from us. A bit disappointing but the dolphins definitely made up for it. 

- Megan Whittaker 

Tour at 09:00

Report from Eldey: The day started very promising with sunshine over Reykjavík and amazing sea conditions, just a little bit of swell was left in the bay. It took a bit more than an hour to spot cetaceans on this tour, but than we suddenly came across three different pods of white-beaked dolphins. The first two groups consisted of about 8-11 animals each, and were found only a couple of hundred meters apart. However, they moved away from each other. While watching one pod of dolphins coming closer to us we also got to see a flock of hungry sea birds following a fishing vessel. Soon after we moved on we found the third pod of about 4-5 dolphins but headed further offshore quickly. After a while we saw another pod of these dolphins jumping in the distance, however, suddenly also a minke whale appeared a few hundred meters away from us and we decided to try to get a better look at this individual. Since it was going for rather long dives, we had to be a bit patience, but then we saw it surfacing a few times only about 100 meters away. In the end, we spotted another pod of the white-beaked dolphins (10-12 animals) and we watched them for a while as they were feeding together with many northern gannets and other birds. In the distance, we could see another two pods of dolphins jumping out of the water before we headed back to the Old Harbour of Reykjavík. 

- Hanna Michel

Bird species seen on today's tours include: northern gannets, northern fulmars, arctic terns, great black-backed gulls, kittiwakes.