A stunning aurora

Well last night gave us a Northern Lights show that hands down beats any other that I've seen, early in the day I had checked the forecast and it looked as if there was going to be an okay display that night. Over the last few weeks the aurora has been active nearly every night so last night looked to be just the same as other nights. But then in the evening I checked again and suddenly it looked as if there was a geomagnetic storm hitting northern Europe, safe to say I quickly changed my plans and ran out to the nearby lighthouse Grótta to have a good look at them. Even on the drive over we could see the sky was very active everywhere we looked.

Then we got to our spot and escaped from all the cars in the area (it is a very popular spot for the aurora so getting away from the car park is essential). The sky was alight with a display, you could look in every direction and there would be something new to see! The most common colour to see during an auroral display is green, the rarest is red and you also get blue and purple auroras sometimes. Well tonight we had ourselves a green and RED display!

There was even one moment when a huge beam spread over our heads and then circled above us forming a tight ball. 

Then the ball... exploded.

 It was like a film showing a flower blooming except it was a green and red ball of angelic delight, it is so hard to describe. It was a perfect thing to see, unfortunately as it was directly above me it was nearly impossible to take a picture of it but that was just one of those times where you need to see it rather than take a picture of it. 

And this was the perfect chance to give my new tripod a real test!

A first try was a decent attempt, you see me with my photography partner Soffia!

This my friends. Is a picture I will consider framing. LOOK AT THE COLOURS!

This was towards the city, away from the water.

A good attempt at capturing the explosion of colour above us.

And here we see the aurora over Álftanes. Every direction!

Thanks for reading! There may be another storm in the next few days (it was even seen in the UK so keep watching!)

South coast success! Also 1000 views!

This time of year in Iceland we get a lot of capelin migrating into the area around our bay, Faxaflói, and the south coast from where we sometimes sail. We haven't actually sailed from Reykjavík in quite a while, all of our tours have been focused on following the fish and hoping that we'll see something feeding there!

And this is a strategy that works absolutely perfectly! The tours over the last week have been excellent and have been a real pleasure to guide on, it really makes up for all those dry tours when I get to really flex my whale knowledge muscles. Especially a few days ago when we saw a Humpback Whale after only 20 minutes of sailing and so for virtually the entire tour I had to talk about almost nothing but Humpbacks. Thank god they're my favourite species of cetacean! Just yesterday at the end of a tour one tourist said to me 'How do you know so much?'. And I think that may be the nicest question I've ever been asked!

There was one trip that really stands out above all the others in terms of pure quality, definitely one that I'm going to remember! (When this happens I always try to make the tourists understand how they saw something special but I get the feeling most people just can't appreciate some natural rarities). So this trip! In total we saw 4-5 Humpback Whales (Metaptera novaeangliae) after sailing from Grindavík on the south coast of the Reykjanes peninsula. Now just this on its own would constitute a very successful tour, but the behaviour of the Humpbacks! An ethogram is a list of behaviours of a species and it honestly looked like these whales had just read an ethogram and wanted to test out what they'd just learned!
The variety of behaviours was just intense, there must have been an incredible abundance of fish in the area for both the whales to display the feeding behaviour they did and have enough energy to spare to risk being so energetic!
First of all one of the first whales we saw was rolling around at the surface of the water and as it was doing this it lifted both of its pectoral fins (front flippers) out of the water and into the air, I'd never seen a Humpback do this with both fins before so I was extremely happy to see this! Then a couple of the whales started to lunge feed at the surface of the water, they were coming head first out of the water to swallow the fish at the surface. One of the whales actually spy-hopped! This is when an animal sticks just its head out of the water in order to have a look at what is above the surface, it's rare to see a Humpback so curious about the boats!
And the icing on the awesome cake was that one of the whales we saw right at the end of the tour fully breached out of the water, it threw its entire body out of the water! And only around 50m away from the boat! I was almost speechless, I only managed to scream into the microphone. I don't think there was a better way to express my joy!
And on the afternoon tour of that day a humpback was underwater mere metres away from the boat and with it completely visible under the surface it rolled its body 360°. Which again left me speechless, it really seemed like it was showing off!
Unfortunately I missed basically all of the crucial pictures of these moments, I can't yet hold a microphone and operate a camera so I'll probably miss a few of these moments.

I'll show you what pictures I did get but this post was really about sharing an amazing story!

Two of the whales at the surface of the water

You can see one whale lunging beside its partner, its mouth just coming out of the water.

And a really nice fluke shot to top it all off!

Thanks for reading!

P.S. I've just passed 1000 views of the blog! Celebration time! I got some quite nice Northern Lights pictures recently while testing my new camera tripod, the activity was quite low but I managed to get some nice scenery into the pictures to really spice up the shots. So they're a treat for you!

We waited for a very long time this night for the lights, we were with the Sun Voyager which is an art piece on the coast in Reykjavík and it made for some nice shots.

This is the nicest shot, you can see Mount Esja in the background too!

This was almost great, but the wind made my camera shake which made it a little blurry. 

Thanks again!

More Orca in Faxafloi!

Once again we've had a bit of an enforced break, an awful lot of dry tours all around our bay. Yesterday the tour went out and saw a humpback whale in Keflavik (though I wasn't onboard) and so today we set out from the same spot. But as soon as we set off we heard that another tour company had just spotted Orca just outside Reykjavik, typical!

So we headed straight for the Orca! The sailing was pretty perfect, the sea was very smooth and the visibility was excellent!

We saw around 4 Orca; there was 2 big males, 1 female and 1 very young Orca. Possibly a calf!

Time to let the pictures do the talking!

Notice the hump in the dorsal of the Orca, they develop this at 16 years of age. This guy was quite large so he seems to be a fairly old individual.

Passengers in the foreground, snaefellsnes in the background. Awesome!

Here the dorsal has a different hump, this time in the the top of the dorsal.

A better look at the second male.

This is my favourite of the group from today!

A pic of the little one!

Thanks for reading!