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!