Let me just start by saying... I saw a freakin' whale! This was not one of those things on a national geographic special... this was a real life living freakin' whale swimming along all happy like. Ok ok ok, the beginning...

We were able to have another lazy start today because our tour wasn't scheduled until 1pm. You would think by now we would be fully recovered from jet lag, but either we are tired from doing so much... Or we're still jet lagged...  

We got an email from the tour company informing us that we should go to an alternate tour start point. The two big whale tour companies out here will combine their passengers if they don't have a full load so they only need to send out a single boat. This is for the sake of conservation and, I'm assuming, not being too disruptive to the animals.

The pickup point was just a few blocks from where we are staying. Actually, it's right across the street from where we had fish and chips the other night, so we really didn't have far to walk at all. I booked the tour just a few days prior because it looked like the best chance for decent weather... Looking up at the sky I can safely say - nailed it! Blue skies and sunny for the first time since arriving in Iceland.

The boat itself is pretty big. Amanda doesn't do too well with lots of movement, so I hoped a bigger ship would make for a smoother ride. I ended up not needing to worry because with the lovely weather we were having the seas were super calm.

The first half of the tour was mainly getting out of the harbor and then getting far enough from land to get to the area where all of the animal activity usually is. We spent most of that time standing on the top deck watching another whale watching tour ship that left the harbor with us.  

The excitement started once our two ships separated a ways. The other ship radioed over that they had seen a pod of dolphins. Apparently most of the tour companies are friendly over here and are willing to share that sort of information with one another. Immediately our ship starts making a beeline for the other one and off in the distance you could see smaller ships also start turning towards the activity. Amanda and I made our way to the top deck in the front of the ship and were able to catch a few glimpses of fins in the distance.  

There's a watcher up on a platform on the ship that is constantly chiming in over a speaker with the position and distance of whatever it is everyone is trying to see. Once the excitement starts you hear announcements of "dolphins at 12 o'clock, 200 meters" ... "Now at 1 o'clock 100 meters". All the while everyone is wiggling their heads to try to see in between the stubborn few who had been planted in their siteseeing perch since the boat left the dock. Still, it was exciting, almost feeling like we were under attack with the constant updates as far as location/distance callouts.

At first all I could catch was a glimpse here and there of a few fins before they would disappear beneath the water again. The Armada of boats that suddenly sprang up out of nowhere weaved in and out of one another trying to give their passengers a view. However suddenly there were multiple pods around us and I was able to catch a large one swimming together:

We stayed with the dolphins for a bit, but then both big boats turned towards open waters again. The tour companies have a policy that if you don't see any whales you can come back on another cruise for free. They have a pretty high chance of seeing them out here, so I guessed that the captain was trying to find us some whales in order to not have to give us a voucher.

For a while it was pretty nice, the boat was facing into the sun and it gave us a chance to warm up again. It's a lot colder on the water, doubly so with the wind. That's partly why the video clips are so short, because I would need to dip them into my pockets to warm them up quickly. We saw a bunch of birds: seagulls, puffins, Arctic something or another's, and some funny little birds that would dive down into the water whenever the boat approached.  

We briefly saw a harbor porpoise, but it dived down never to be seen again before I could get my camera ready. We started to think that we were going to need to settle for just seeing dolphins (still pretty cool, but a let down from what we were after).

Over the radio another boat in the area made a callout of whale activity in the area. Again, you could see all the boats immediately turn towards the same heading and start going full steam ahead. It took a cold 15 minutes to get there, but as we pulled up we saw water shoot up into the air as a humpback whale blew water out of it's spout. A girl behind me screamed in joy (quite startling really) and then immediately began apologizing to everyone around her.

The whale would come up for air and then dive down. We later learned that this was their feeding area, and they were doing just that... Feeding. While they can hold their breathes for a long time, when they are feeding they use up a lot of oxygen diving down forcing them to come up for air more often. Every few minutes it (or perhaps there were a few) would surface in a different area and all of the boats would rotate to stay with it.

We stayed there for a while before the captain decided we needed to go back. The tour was only supposed to be 2.5 hours long but we were nearing 3 and we still had a long return journey left. I managed to grab a last clip of the whale right as we were leaving:

Awesome stuff.

On the way back we saw a Minke whale. Apparently it jumped out of the water, but I didn't get to see that. The captain was nice enough to stop the boat to let us watch it for a bit (even though we were super late at this point). By now Amanda and I were sitting at the very back of the boat on the lowest level. As we picked up speed I spotted the whale surface and then start diving just a few feet behind the boat in the wake. Super cool.

All in all, definitely a worthwhile experience. We were lucky to see just about all the animals that were possible, and all on our last day in Reykjavik. Big thanks to Special Tours for an awesome tour and for sticking it out longer for all their customers. Definitely recommending them for anyone in the future.