Friday, 21 May 2021

Windy day in the fjord but sunny and beautiful as usual in the north! Today we had a very special tour, a very rare sighting of Humpback whales sleeping!! It is quite unique experience to find these giants resting as we are in the feeding season and in that time they need to eat about 1 ton of food per day so it is incredibly rare to find them on the tours just resting. We sailed all the way to south of Hrisey where first we found one humpback whale, going on long but shallow dives, sometimes we were able to see his flippers just under the surface but he wouldn’t come up. We headed out north and and spotted 2 more blows and a fluke of another Humpback whale! To our surprise this one also seemed to be resting! We had one close encounter and all the rest were rather distant, going for long dives without fluking. We headed back to Akureyri and on our way back we found another sleeping Humpback whale! At this point this was just funny for everyone on board, but we decided to stay a bit longer to take a better look. This whale also didn’t show us the tail, but we had few very nice encounters when he came up just meters away from the boat. All together we took a good look at 3 Humpbacks today, but it was rather challenging to observe them, there were at least 2 more in the area but due to windy conditions we couln’t follow them.

Pictures & Text: Ania Wojcik

Departures today: 13:00 Classic