A Bottlenose whale or not?

Today, there were two trips in the bay, as the days before. In both tours the passengers were very fortunate, because they could saw three Minke Whales, sometimes surfacing very close to the boat. The weather was also quite good, with wind blowing from the south, what means warm wind, but at the end of the second tour the rain surprised us for a while, but it was almost at the harbour, so it was not so terrible.

But the point today was a strange event. During the first trip, close to the mountains of the western part of the bay, we observed a big dark body breaching and a big splash, we thought that it was a Minke Whale, so we went to the area where we spotted the whale and waited, but nothing happened. We didn’t see any splashes or anything surfacing. The tour ended and in the second trip something similar happened again, we saw something surfacing for a few seconds and nothing more. We waited for over 20 minutes but nothing happened and when we were starting to head back to Húsavík, we saw again the same thing, disappearing few seconds after surfacing.

According to this behaviour we think that the whale we saw might have been a Northern Bottlenose whale. These whales always do the same,  come up to the surface for a few seconds and disappear very fast, diving for about half an hour before the next surfacing. They are ones of the greatest divers of all whales. Maybe it was a bottlenose whale, maybe not, but we want to think that maybe in the next days we can see it again and hopefully even better!!

Teresa, deckhand