An amazing day!
It was raining this morning when I got to work and looking over the bay I didn´t feel excited for today´s tours. We went out on Náttfari at 10 am, captain Hrólfur, Tomasz (our engineer), myself and some 68 passengers. The sea was rough and it was foggy, we couldn´t even see the mountains ahead of us. We had been sailing for about 45 minutes when I saw this big massive blow a bit far away and called up Hrólfur on the radio to tell him the exact position of the whale. I told him that I had seen a blow from a humpback whale but something in my head made me wonder if maybe, just maybe, the blow had been way too big to be only from a humpback. Could it be from a blue whale?
We drove for a couple of minutes and then, all of a sudden, it blows again! So close to us now that I had no doubt whatsoever; it was definitely a blue whale!
The passengers got all really excited about seeing the biggest animal on earth and it was only to increase their excitement when we noticed that there were actually TWO blue whales! A mother
and its calf. We managed to follow the whales for some time and they kept coming up right next to the boat, we were so lucky!
Then we decided to take a quick stop a Lundey (Puffin Island) before returning to Húsavík and close to the island we came across a minke whale that was feeding. And of course the puffins were at their usual place, circling around the island.. always a pretty sight.
The second tour today started off pretty bad. We sailed to the western part of the bay, always on the look -out for our friends from the morning trip but no massive blows were seen.
There were so many birds in that part of the bay that we thought there aught to be some whales in the area. But after almost 2 hours of endless searching and no finding we started to lose hope.
Then, fortunately, captain Hrólfur saw a minke whale in the distance so we headed over there. We got so see it a couple of times but shortly after we found it we needed to start moving towards the harbour. All the way back I kept looking around us, hoping to see something more to show the passengers and finally, pretty close to Húsavík, I saw two humpbacks blowing not so far away from us. A great way to end the tour!
When we were reaching the harbour the sun started to shine so even if the weather isn‘t all great when you wake up in the morning you have to remember you‘re in Iceland. Even if it is foggy, raining and SNOWING the sun can also shine the very same day. That‘s Iceland.
Halla Marin, guide.
