Whale Watching Blog

May 27th 2011

Super whale watching

At 13:00 I came down to the pier and waited for our boat, Bjössi Sör, to return from the morning trip. Guide Christian said it was probably one of the best whale watching tour he had ever been on, they saw 4 humpback whales in the same spot and then they found a minke whale as well. A very good success!

But I want to tell you about the afternoon tour which was fantastic and definitely one of my best whale watching tours ever!
I was pretty optimistic leaving the harbor since the bay was full of whales in the morning and we headed straight to the area where the humpbacks had been.
Christian came with us too and after a while I said to him that I really wanted to see a blue whale today. There was kind of a blue whale-weather and last year we found the first blue whales of the season on the 27th of May, it would be really cool for that to happen again.

When we found the humpbacks in the middle of the bay, and discovered that they were FIVE together now, I totally forgot about my dream of seeing a blue whale that day. Watching five humpbacks together, coming up one after another 5-10 meters away from the boat, was just so amazing. I have never seen so many of them together and it's definitely not something we see every day!

When we had been watching the group of five for some time, out of the corner of my eye I saw a spout far, far away in the north west. I wasn't sure at first but after we saw it for the second and third time, me and Christian were sure it couldn't be another humpback since we saw it so clearly and yet it was all this distance away from us.
I got really excited and me and captain Hreiðar decided to head over there and check it out, worst case scenario we wouldn't find anything but we would probably be able to find the humpbacks again on the way back.

We didn't need to worry because after a short while we saw the blow again and it was closer than we thought and so huge. It had to be a blue whale!
And it was, as we soon found out when it raised the tail and we could see it was a blue whale tail. We got to the area where it was and followed it for a while, it came up frequently and always pretty close to the boat so we were lucky!

On the way back to Húsavík we came across the group of humpbacks again and the passengers were extremely happy with the tour, understandably!
When we were reaching the harbor and I was saying goodbye to the people and going over what we had seen on the trip I didn't have any words to describe it; amazing, wonderful, fantastic, magnificent, terrific and stupendous are a few words I can think of now!

Halla Marín, guide.

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