Sunny weather, but rather difficult minkes
Today I was guiding both tours, at 10:00 and 13:30. The weather was nice, it was a sunny September day, but out in the bay the waves were pretty long and high ? probably heralding the storm that is forecasted for the next days.
However, the first tour went pretty well. We saw two different minke whales, which came quite close to the boat a few times, but were also often changing directions during the dives. Maybe they were just busy feeding before they leave Iceland and start heading south into the warmer waters during the next weeks.
The second minke whale actually surfaced several times just a few metres from the shore, close to the mountains in the western part of the bay.
During the tour, we also saw one more minke whale surfacing in a distance, so there were definitely three different minkes in the bay this morning.
The afternoon tour (13:30) was a bit more difficult. After about half an hour we found a minke whale in the southern part of the bay. It was surfacing a few times and went down for a dive, like minke whales usually do, but then it disappeared (at least we did not see it again). After circling around in the area for a while we decided to go further west, to the area where we were watching another minke whale in the morning. Even though we were searching there for a very long time and even though there was a lot of birdlife in the area, we did not find any minke whales. Instead of that, we came across several harbour porpoises.
These two trips were the last tours before the storm, which is supposed to last at least two days. But of course it is always exciting to go out on the first tours after a bad weather period. You never know how things will change and hopefully there will be more food blown into the bay 😉
Christian, guide
Picture: The abandoned farm house in Naustavík
