Tuesday, 07_October 2014

Tour at 13:00

Report from Hafsúlan: we could not have asked for better weather with the sun shining on us and the sea as flat like it was today. We headed straight to the area where we had seen the dolphins on the morning tour. We had not even reached the area when we noticed breaching dolphins ahead. We went towards them and got a good look at two pods of white-beaked dolphins, each with about 4-5 individuals. They came toward us and went few times under the boat! We soon realized that there were many pods of dolphins in the bay and we were nearly always able to see splashes made by the jumping dolphins around the boat throughout the tour.  Everyone got excited when they heard a passenger had seen a big whale few hundred meters away. We headed towards the location of the animal and soon we saw it when it came up again, it was a small minke whale! After few minutes with this minke we spotted another minke whale little further out on the bay. While we watched the second minke whale we noticed that a group of 3-4 dolphins was coming towards us on the other side, so at that time we had two minke whales and a group of dolphins in the same area! When we had to sail back to land we were lucky enough to have the dolphins traveling in the same direction so we could enjoy their company longer.

-Sigurlaug

Tour at 09:00

Report from Hafsúlan: the air was still and the sea very calm when we sailed out on the bay this morning. It was very easy to spot animals in great distance because the sea was so flat and that definitely helped us a lot. We sailed for a while until we saw a flock of sea birds feeding ahead of us so we decided to go and have a look if we could find any cetaceans there. We were still in a long distance to the birds when we spotted a group of 5-6 white-beaked dolphins underneath the birds. They were very energetic, jumping up in the air making big splashes! We saw them swimming in circles in the same area and we could detect a lot of fish under the boat so they were most likely feeding. After a good time with the dolphins we decided to keep on going further out on the bay. We found another area with with a big flock of feeding birds and there we spotted a group of cute 4-5 harbor porpoises swimming around.  After watching the porpoises go by we spotted a minke whale in a great distance, we sailed towards it but were not able to spot it again. Before we went back to the harbor we again got good sightings of 4-5 white-beaked dolphins.

-Sigurlaug

Birds seen on today's tour include: Northern gannets, glaucous gulls, kittiwakes, cormorants, common guillemots, black-backed gulls, arctic skua, northern fulmars and eider duckes