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!