Iceland: Epilogue part 3

Where them whales at then? I thought you were a cetacean specialist and spent most of the last year watching them? Have you been lying to us?!

If you are one of the many people expressing this then have no fear because it is time for my tribute to the stars of the show!
I shall present this in a manner resembling my tours and start with the 4 most common species found around Iceland.

Harbour Porpoise (Phocoena phocoena)

So this the smallest and most elusive species we find on our tours and as such photographing them is very difficult. In fact on my tours when we would see a porpoise on my tours I would initiate the "Porpoise Challenge ©" whereby the first person to get any kind of picture of a porpoise could claim a free drink at the bar from me. This was only ever completed once. It takes practice to get photos of these guys, so the few shots I have are ones that I am proud of.

You can see his little face!

These two pictures were taken on the same day but you can see that the sea isn't exactly calm. Normally you need great conditions to see them but this day was so special that even high waves don't hide the porpoises. To be honest even on good days I would rarely even try to take pictures of them so I have seen them much more than I have pictures of them.

White-Beaked Dolphin (Lagenorhynchus albirostris)

The white beaks! The only species of dolphin seen on a common basis on our tours, a really beautiful species with black and white stripes along their large bodies. A joke I am very fond of using on my tours is that normal dolphins may have much thinner bodies but real dolphins have curves. In Reykjavík these were a much more common sight than in Húsavík and very often were the saviour of tours. I can't count how many times we would spend two hours chasing elusive whales before coming across a pod of leaping dolphins to lift everyone's spirits.

And they are incredibly photogenic, especially when they bow-ride at the front of the boat or leap metres out of the water.

Here we have the acrobatic behaviour displayed by the dolphins but you can also see how chunky the bodies are of this species. This kind of breach isn't the most graceful, in fact this particular dolphin was doing this in order to look at our boat. The set of pictures show it angling its head toward the boat at all times.

This is a much more graceful and playful dolphin, again leaping but this time it was right at the front of the boat and interacting with our bow. Also my best white beak picture I reckon!

Of course as these are dolphins they are social animals too, but this is unlike some tropical species which will travel in pods of hundreds of thousands. I did once across a whole tour see around 200 dolphins, but that was an incredible day where the entire bay was filled with dolphins. Aside from that a normal pod would be around 4-10 individuals large.

Minke Whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata)

Ah the Minke Whale, by far the most common species we saw on our tours in Reykjavík. And the butt of many jokes by whale watching guides around the country. It is smallest baleen whale and unlike the more popular Humpback Whale it rarely displays acrobatic behaviour. In fact guides in the north would often tell me how they couldn't speak for more than a few minutes about this species if pushed, whereas in Reykjavík we have to base our entire tours around them. (They have it easy in the north!).

But I seem to have a charm with this species, I managed to be very very lucky with Minke Whales! If there was a Minke breaching, I was probably guiding. If it was lunging or playing then again I would be on board. So while they had a reputation for being boring I saw some seriously exciting stuff from them.

This was an utterly unique tour. The single greatest interaction with a Minke that I have had.
There was a juvenile that was extremely interested in our boat, at first it was circling us and kept coming up next to us. On its own this is special. But then it did something extraordinary. The whale came up on our left, brought its head out of the water... then proceeded to open and close its mouth at the surface. It wasn't feeding as there was no fish there. So it was simply looking at this boat and almost mouthing words to us. I really wish I could explain why this happened but the only explanation would be that this was a very young playing with us.

And this is a fairly normal picture of a Minke Whale, just to see what I would normally see on these tours. Great sea conditions though!

Humpback Whale (Megaptera novaeangliae)

There's many people who know just how much I've been looking forward to writing this section. To say that I love Humpback Whales is an understatement. They are my favourite cetacean by a long way, most people prefer the (still awesome) Orca but for me the Humpback takes the gold.

I could talk and type for hours about this species, but I'll just say that they move with a grace absent from virtually everything else. They have a curiosity that is evidence of great intelligence. They sing like angels and their breathing sends shivers down my spine. The almighty flukes of the Humpback are their trademark and every time one is raised it is hard not to grin like an idiot. Also when they breach I scream like a girl.

POWER! The water cascades from the tip of the fluke as it tosses the Atlantic about as if it were naught but a feather!

I only want to put two pictures per species in order not to make this longer than it already is. So among the plethora of choices available I have chosen this lovely picture of a Humpback sat at the surface. I could show them doing any number of powerful things but this was always my favourite thing about them. The way they sit at the surface, the epitome of calm, there was a few times I was brought to tears guiding and this kind of thing would set me off. To me there are few more beautiful sights.

Killer Whale (Orcinus orca)

The one 90% of tourists ask about! Do we see orca here? Well yes we do but it is very rare, but when it does happen... it's incredible. I vividly remember my first sight of a Killer Whale. It was early December and we were sailing back to the city. So I was downstairs (I was a researcher at this point) filling out data forms. Then the guide, Freydís, says on the mic that there had been a huge black dorsal fin spotted in the distance. At this point we sprint upstairs, forgetting my gloves in winter of course. But I really don't care! This is a single male, clearly very old by the marks on his huge dorsal fin. Very odd to see a single orca rather than a pod but my first sighting still made me incredibly happy.

Then over the rest of the year we saw orca around 6 more times, at a guess. My pictures from the first encounter are poor but I have some really excellent ones from later.

Okay so this is two species, but how awesome is it that there were Humpback Whales and Killer Whales feeding in the same location! And to get them side by side, this was a tour worth remembering!

I just love how defined the body of the Orca is here, you have the remains of the blow coming out of the blowhole and the white patch over the eye. The dorsal fin shows this is an adult male, the fin is very large and has a round bump in the middle.

Fin Whale (Balaenoptera physalus)

There was only once I was lucky enough to spy the second largest species of whale, but this was a tour that I will never forget. This was in Húsavík and as we were contemplating whether to go out on the last tour of the day the call came in that Fin Whales had been spotted in the bay. This made up our minds for us instantly. We set sail and immediately saw a huge blow from a whale clearly a lot larger than something we normally see. Fin Whales are incredibly fast and showed this here, whenever we arrived to the area where they were last they had moved very far away. We gave pursuit for a while and started to get tired, then one of fellow researchers made the joke "Wouldn't it be funny if they appeared right next us now?". As if on cue a mother and calf Fin Whale surfaced either side of our small boat, the sound as they breached the surface was enough to really scare us all! Then they stayed with the boat very calmly for a while, to be this close to such a behemoth was... exhilarating.

The Fin Whales were so close and so huge that getting a full shot of them was impossible. But here is a headshot of this giant whale!

Okay! Phew! There is my round up of the cetaceans we found in our bays in Iceland! That was longer than I thought it would be. So there is one last thing I want to talk about in this epilogue, so part 4 is coming up...

Thanks for reading!

P.S. Though not a cetacean we did see a lot of Basking Sharks this summer, unfortunately I never got a picture apart from a blurry one from my phone.