My Icelandiversary! Here's to 6 more weeks.

I arrived in Iceland on July 24th 2013, it started with a week in Reykjavík city on holiday. Then August 1st I arrived in Húsavík where the next two months would serve to be some of the most influential and memorable of my life. I can never thank North Sailing enough for the time we enjoyed up north. My love affair with Húsavík continues to this day and I still dream of returning as soon as I can. This was where I experienced my first of many species of cetacean and the northern lights. I will always remember the night when we all decided to go up to the local hot tub with a bunch of beers. As we soaked and drank the northern lights proceeded to burst over Skjálfandi bay. At that point it was clear life wouldn't get much better.
Then on October 1st I moved down to Reykjavík to continue my volunteer work for Elding, this continued through to December. And then in January Elding hired me as a guide for them. And if I have to thank anyone for everything I've achieved here it would have to be Elding.
Trying to list everything that has happened here would simply undersell it. All I can really do is enjoy the last 6 weeks of my time here in Iceland.

Leaving Iceland, well that'll be hard. But I guess its best to cross that bridge when it arrives.

But for now I'll say to my Húsavík girls; Ailie, Naomi, Charla, Tania, Dunja thank you for the G&Ts and more laughs than I would have thought possible.
And to Elding crew; Megan and Freydís who had the fantastic idea to hire me.
Soffia for sharing the duty of being a novice guide in the winter though after you dropped the mic into the sea the new one is pretty unreliable... grrr!
Linda, Dominik and Carine for being awesome housemates and great guides.
To my fellow volunteers during my research phase in Reykjavík; Loes you were a proper tea buddy who taught me some Dutch that has proved invaluable in impressing my favourite tourists, the Dutch! Megan B, you were the most adventurous person to ever grace this company and just so you know you'll find me in Vancouver Island as soon as I can trying to hug to Orca there!

Skál Ísland. Takk fyrir allt!

Here's to 6 more weeks.

July 18-22

There's three days to cover this time. First I'll cover the latest wildlife trend that's been occurring in the bay, it started last week while I was back in the UK and has carried on through the present. We've had numerous phases of behaviour from animals that come and go, March-April was basically Humpback season, May was full of excellent Minkes that were feeding and being interactive, June and half of July have been pretty poor to be honest. It's all been very 6/10.
But now it's much better! We've had a real influx of White-Beaked Dolphins in the bay, and many of them have been very curious and playful with the boat.

You can see how close they get, plus I love it when you see them under the surface just as they take a breath.

This is great for perspective, mere metres from the boat!

They often use the energy and motion created by the movement of the boat to leap and surf around us. It's a fantastic sign that we are having a mutually beneficial interaction.

During a midnight sun tour we had a really beautiful sunset, here it illuminates the volcanic glacier Snæfellsjökull (Sny-fells-yeu-kukl) and the cruise ship beside it serves to frame it.
Interestingly when this cruise ship set off a passenger had a heart attack and the rescue teams from Reykjavík flew out to assist, it was an interesting sight.

The best thing about sunsets is how the light changes constantly, you should always watch the sky just to see the light change.

Sunsets always looks great out of focus, I had some fun with the manual focus for this one.

This is from a different day to the rest of the dolphins but you can see how this dolphin has a very serious wound. This is 99% a bite wound, and how red it is shows how it must be fresh. In Ólafsvík recently there was a sighting of Orca attacking dolphins, this could be one of the survivors. Well done fella!

And we should always remember the whales! Here's quite a nice shot of a Minke Whale, you can see the head of this whale as it breached the surface. Speaking of that there was a tour recently where we had the pleasure of seeing a Minke Whale breach 5 times!!! It was around 1km away but it was distinctly a minke throwing its body out of the water, because this is me though I couldn't get a picture. I was a little busy yelling and screaming, I've developed a bit of a company reputation for reacting loudly to big situations. That usually means I get distracted and don't use my camera.

Thanks for reading!

There's always more to discover in Iceland

Last week I took another trip, though this one was a 2 day trip to Vestmannæyar (The Westman Islands) to have an explore of what is reputed to be a beautiful Archipelago. I only visited the main (and only inhabited) island named Heimaey.
Even on the ferry trip over to the island the adventure began, I spotted a Minke Whale in the distance. I pointed this out to nearby passengers and ended up guiding the ferry trip, once a guide a guide!
The island itself is incredible, there are two volcanoes of which one is just 40 years old after the first had a huge eruption which created a second huge crater. It is also the largest Atlantic Puffin colony in Iceland with around 1.2 million breeding puffins coming to the island every summer.
So if you want to be literally surrounded by puffins this is the place to be! It is also a photographers paradise as you will see now!

The volcano hovers above the town, both intimidating and beautiful.

The harbour area is surrounded by mountains and lava fields.

As I walked through the new lava fields there was a pair of Golden Plovers that put on a bit of a show. Here is the male.

You can see how new these lava fields are, still so bright red!

The female Golden Plover posing in a small field.

Have you ever been attacked by an Oystercatcher? Because this was a very angry one that was pretty terrifying.

Though it did give me some great picture opportunities

Yay for more Icelandic Horses!

The highlight was of course the many many puffins that were on the island!

My favourite picture that I took, this one goes into my hall of highlights!

This particular puffin was excellent, I got extremely close to this one without it caring about my presence.

That moment when you think you recognise someone but aren't sure, I'll just have a stealthy look...

I'm actually back in the UK right now but I'll be back in Iceland on the 17th, then just 6-7 more weeks left....

Thanks for reading!

The best trip of the last few months

Lately the trips have been.... sub-par. Terrible weather and poorly behaved animals mean that no matter how much effort we put into our guiding we simply can't achieve what we want. This is the most infuriating thing you can imagine for a guide, and something that other professions don't experience.
So today was a matter of utter relief! Due to terrible conditions in our normal bay we sailed from Grindavík on the south coast, we haven't done this in many months! Today was actually a day-off for me but frankly you should never pass up a trip from Grindavík. When we sail from there you either have the best tours possible, or nothing.
The morning trip was actually one of the latter, no animals were seen. But I wasn't on the morning trip, and I am an orca magnet.

So we sailed from the south this afternoon in an attempt to be more successful, we started by spotting a HUGE blow in the distance. Frankly anything that isn't a Minke Whale is exciting (I'm rather bored by them) and this certainly wasn't a minke. In fact due to the size of the blow we had thought it was something as large as a Fin Whale or Sei Whale, it turned out to be two Humpback Whales travelling side by side thus the huge looking blow. We actually saw four Humpbacks but all of them were diving for very long times so we never really got a good look at them. This was exacerbated by the fact that we were surrounded by ORCA! Killer Whales! (Orcinus orca)

Okay... surrounded is an exaggeration as it was a pod of six which were swimming around an area close to our boat, most likely feeding. But as orcas normally are, they were very nonplussed by our boat and were calmly swimming very close and around our boat.

A female with her calf swimming up to her.

You can spot the male due to the very large dorsal fin

But you see he is quite young, no hump on the dorsal fin means he is below 16 years old.

You can see the comparison between the sexes here. Female left and male right.

We were treated to a number of incredible behaviours, one orca was leaping and some were throwing their tails around. This was the only one of these behaviours I could photograph.

Love this pic of three orca travelling side by side

So there was one large, but quite young male with a number of grown females and a few juveniles, plus a calf!

Thanks for reading!