Bad weather for two days

 The past two days have been very bad for whale watching. The strong winds from the North have stopped us from going out to sea altogether. We tried going out at twelve o‘clock yesterday but had to turn back as soon as we reached the opening of the harbour.    The sea is very rough,…

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Bad weather for two days

The past two days have been very bad for whale watching. The strong winds from the North have stopped us from going out to sea altogether. We tried going out at twelve o‘clock yesterday but had to turn back as soon as we reached the opening of the harbour.    The sea is very rough,…

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An unsuccessful day

Today was not so good. I had two trips, both with Britta, another guide here at North Sailing. We saw practically nothing all day.    In the first trip I caught a glimpse of a minke whale. I only saw it come up to breathe two or three times but then we lost it. The…

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The travels of a blue whale

The Marine Research Institute of Iceland just reported on their webpage www.hafro.is that they have been tracking a blue whale by satellite. The satellite transmitter was put in the blue whale here in Skjálfandi Bay on June 23rd or 56 days ago. During that time the blue whale has traveled approximately 7.700 km. It stayed in Skjálfandi for…

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Hard-to-find minkes

This morning was a bit rough. The whales were nowhere to be found at first, not close to the mountains like they were yesterday. We went out far north on the 10 o‘clock trip to try and scout the entire bay and eventually we saw whales far in the distance. When we arrived we found…

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Minkes in the sunshine

Today was a difficult but rewarding day. I had two trips, the 10 and 13:30 o‘clock. Both trips were pretty similar; We had to travel very far south in the bay, practically up against the mountains, to find the whales. One whale even went so close to the cliffs that the boats could not follow…

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A difficult day

This day was definitely not the best I've had. I did three tours today and I was really close to seeing nothing on all the trips but somehow managed to get luck in the end of all of them. On the first tour me and captain Hreiðar had been sailing for almost two hours when…

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Tricky minkes

This was acutally a bit tough day. In the afternoon it was getting a little windy and the searching conditions were hard. When I came to go out at 17:00 with captain Þórunn we heard from Knörrinn that they had been out for almost two hours without seeing anything. So we decided to head to…

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Mostly minkes

There is still no sign of the humpback whales in the bay but the minkes are doing a great job of keeping the show going on their own. The weather has been great for the past few days. Today we had slow northern winds but the sun was shining which kept the temperature up. Some…

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Beautiful Blues!

The Blue whale heading south in to the bay © Colin Williams This morning our North Sailing boat, schooner Haukur reported some exciting news to the rest of the fleet: "Some BIG whales out on the horizon north west of Puffin island!" Our two other boats, Knörrinn and Bjössi Sör, who had just left the harbour…

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A mixed day

During our first trip today I was certain it was going to be a bad day. We only found one minke whale and we were only able to see it twice. We returned to harbour not too happy but at least we had found a whale. But my second trip of the day however was…

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Minkes in great variety!

The humpbacks are still absent from the bay but we have fortunately had lots of minkes. The minkes are harder to tell apart so we are not completely sure how many there are in the bay. Last night we saw a couple of tiny minke whales; One was smaller than average but compared to the…

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Minkes and Northern Bottlenose

Today was nice and sunny and very much appreciated by the crews to get the south winds blowing again after the chilly northerly winds for the past days. On my two tours today, we spotted several minke whales and harbour porpoises in the western part of the bay and  in the first tour we even…

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Ups and downs

I went out on the two last trips today. And these two trips showed extremely well how different each tour can be. The earlier, at 17:00, was a really good trip. Me and captain Bjarki went out on Knörrinn with a group of cheerful Spanish people. It was getting a bit foggy by then but…

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