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!

The legendary midnight sun is finally enjoyed!

The weather recently has been.... pretty awful. Its very easy to forget that it is supposed to be summer, I accept that it won't be warm and that doesn't bother me at all. But please let us have sunshine and less rain!
It has been almost permanently cloudy for the last few weeks and there has been a lot of rain to accompany it, as you may know in the summertime Iceland has very extended sunlight hours. This means the chance for good pictures of sunsets/sunrises is high, unfortunately most of the clear nights have been while I have been working and so I haven't been willing to stay up very late. But last night (I was working of course) there was a clear night and I had the pleasure of guiding a midnight sun tour, for starters it was a great tour anyway! There were two Minke Whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) that were very calm and were swimming around our boat for extended periods of time.
But the best part of the tour was entirely the sunset, with a clear blue sky we had a red sun that was slowly descending across the skyline. Every time you would look back up at the sky the view had changed. But there's only one picture I want to share, its my new background so you can already see it quite well. I've replaced one sunset picture with another!

I climbed up to the highest point of the boat, because safety is my highest priority to grab this shot. 

This was my first real look at the midnight sun and my first of these trips, something tells me I'll like them...

Thanks for reading!

May-June Update

This will be another long post, finding the time to do this so often is very difficult so this kind of bumper update is much easier. An awful lot to post here!

So lets begin!

28/05/2014

A unique moment with a Minke Whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata). This particular tour wasn't anything special for a long time, it was very nice but nothing I would rave about. We were seeing probably around 4-5 Minke Whales across the tour, but one did something utterly unique. The majority of our sightings of these whales are very similar, they travel slowly and predictably. It gets better when they start to feed and may roll or lunge. They could even breach! But this was better. We found a juvenile Minke that was fascinated with our boat, it may have just began to travel without a parent and was on a journey of discovery. Well it approached our boat and at first was swimming around us constantly, on its own this would be special but then it appeared beside us and began opening and closing its mouth out of the water. Now this would normally be a feeding strategy but there was no fish around, so why? Now this is a theory that myself and others have come up with, sometimes whales have been known to try to impress and show off to humans. This young whale was essentially showing off its beautiful baleen plates and bringing its head out of the water so it can see us. And guiding on something like this is such an honour, though I finally took a bit of selfish pleasure. Instead of spending the entire time screaming I actually got some pictures!! Though I missed the best showing... still awesome though!

You can even see the white-striped pectoral fins under the surface!

This fantastic picture was taken by ©Letizia Zezza. 

30/05/2014

My fourth trip to The Golden Circle! As May is still considered Spring in many places I can say I've visited the Golden Circle in every season now! And this was a perfect chance to get the pictures I'd missed the other times, here's the gap fillers:

I now have pics of Gullfoss in every season, yay!

The Raven, a beautiful and majestic bird. At the time this was being attacked by a Gyr Falcon, this is the national symbol of Iceland so finally seeing one was definitely something off my checklist.

Great shot of Strokkur erupting over the landscape.

And the one I've been wanting for a while, as Strokkur erupts this bubble appears for half a second. Gotcha! 

03/06/2014

This is just one picture but it's a good one! A very nice picture of a Minke Whale rolling, its not very often you can see their fluke (tail) and in this shot you can see both the tail and dorsal fin.

04/06/2014

I went on a cracking trip to the Glacial Lagoon at Jökulsárlón, this is an area on the south coast which attaches onto the largest glacier in Europe. Icebergs break off the glacier and float into the sea, at the lagoon you can take a boat trip through all the icebergs. Along with the incredible icebergs you can go through an Arctic Tern nesting colony and we even got to see 4 Harbour Seals! 

There was this little Snow Bunting that was gathering food to feed its chicks, such a pretty bird!

Those Arctic Terns? They attack people. A few of them got me in the head, but I also got some nice pictures of them diving at my head!

One of those Harbour Seals, I really miss seals. 

More Arctic Terns, nice to actually get some pictures while they aren't in flight.

And here's the incredible icebergs that filled the lagoon, such a memorable day. 

16/06/2014

More birds!

These Northern Fulmar are always easy to get pictures of, but they're always nice to look at anyway!

Over the summer I'll make sure to get as many Atlantic Puffin pictures as I can. We'll miss them so much when they go...

The puffin islands are full of life now!

Even in the harbour we have life, there are two families of Eider Ducks that have their ducklings with them now!

The mother watches over the kids, these birds are so cute! Every day at work I look for these guys and watch them for a while. Watching them grow will be a joy this summer!

Wow what a month, we have ourselves the midnight sun now too. Many times I will stay up and watch the sunrise/set within a few hours of each other. Sleeping may be very difficult but its so worth it for the sheer beauty that comes with it.

I would promise to update more often but who knows! See you when I see you!

Thanks for reading!

A very overdue update!

It has been such a long time since my last update, this has been partly due to me moving to a new apartment and not being able to get the internet to work for a long time. But all is sorted now and so now I have a chance to throw a bumper update in! I have three days to talk about, we're at the end of our massive Humpback season and now we have a tonne of Minke Whales in Faxaflói.
But as we're now in summer season the sea conditions and weather have become mostly amazing, days when there is around 1m of swell I start thinking it's rough conditions. Makes such a difference to the winter when that would have been a calm day! I miss the Humpbacks and Killer Whales but the sea conditions make sailing incredibly relaxing. Guiding days like this can be just fantastic.
I've also started using a much more professional photo processor along with my new camera being able to shoot in RAW files. So hopefully everything will look much more shiny from now on!

Look, good Harbour Porpoise pictures! 

This was a big pod that were swimming with our boat for a long time, unusual behaviour from these cetaceans.

The face of a porpoise! So cute!

A huge fluke from a huge Humpback, the last one I've seen so far this year. 

Back to the Minkes! 

I live right by the Reykjavík pond, Tjörnin where a sizeable bird population lives. On good days you can get some amazing pictures!

This picture has such great potential but was out of focus so I pulled the attention to the contrasting colours of the gull and water.

As you can imagine plenty of people were feeding the birds bread.

Puffins!

The puffins have been back for a while and the chance to finally get some good pictures of them is here!

Thanks for reading!