Toothed Whales in the Rain

13:00

Today was a rainy winter day in Reykjavík! The winds were blowing from the southwest today, and they brought in warm air that further melted the snow and turned it to rain. We set sail on today’s Whale Watching tour from the Old Harbor, plotting a course towards the feeding grounds of Faxaflói Bay. The sea surface was almost perfectly flat, with a gentle rolling swell underneath that made it seem like the bay was breathing. We were not sailing for very long before we encountered a large pod of white-beaked dolphins! There were about 20-30 in this pod, and they seemed to be surfacing everywhere we looked, their gray and white colorations standing out well against the grayish blue water. At a few points some of the dolphins became curious about our boat, swimming up to the Andrea to check us out before returning to the rest of their pod in classic fission-fusion fashion. We watched these active toothed whales for quite a while before we left them and continued our search farther out. After a while of sailing, the rain cleared up for us for a time, and we caught a few glimpses of a pod of harbor porpoises, another toothed whale species that is much more shy than their dolphin relatives. Their tiny backs and dorsal fins just barely broke the water surface as they swam south and disappeared. We sailed through the bay a little while longer, retracing the journey of the original settler of Iceland, Ingólfur Arnarson, as we made our way back towards the Old Harbor, having spotted 2 toothed whale species today!

– Jonathan Rempel

Tour Status: ON
Sightings: YES – White-beaked dolphins and Harbor porpoises