Minke Whale and crepuscular rays

Day 3 - Not exactly as planned!

We got to Husavik nice and early as we didn't have to go the long way round this time. We boarded the boat - the Nattfari from North Sailing, got stuffed into some overalls with dire warnings about how cold it would be out on the open sea, got our cameras out and settled down for the trip.

Within 20 minutes we had seen this beauty; this was all the more amazing as yesterday the crew hadn't seen a single thing all day. He stayed with us a while, putting on a bit of a show in the mid morning sun, then he disappeared. Shortly afterwards there was a shout - white nosed dolphins at 11 o'clock... no, 1 o'clock... 3 o'clock...in fact they had surrounded the boat! They stayed with us for ages, darting about, jumping out of the water and swimming under the boat. I didn't get any decent pictures of them, they were too small and even cropped right in the pictures are rubbish, so their images will stay etched in my mind forever.

It was then that I discovered I was no sailor. It was the dolphins that did it. I was holding the camera up with my eye at the viewfinder for long periods at a time, waiting for a dolphin to jump out of the water.. and not being focussed on something still made me feel very very green and ill. It got so bad I had to put the camera away!!

Then... typically, came the best act of the day, a Humpback Whale!! We had turned back towards Husavik when a fishing boat radioed the captain of the Nattfari to say we should turn back, so we did. I couldn't believe my ears when this shout came up, so I leapt up and ran up the boat to have a look. The whale had dived, but after a not so patient wait someone spotted him, a couple of hundred metres away. The captain of the boat yelled "hold on!" and we shot off after him, and after some spectacular troughs and peaks, we came almost alongside the whale... what a beauty! And absolutely what the whole trip was about. I've wanted to go to Iceland to see whales ever since I was a kid, so today I was stood by the side of the boat, green as a bean with tears pouring down my face watching this amazing animal "doing his stuff". Then, with a final flip of his tail he was gone, and we headed back to Husavik, nearly an hour later than scheduled.

They weren't wrong about the cold, either. It's taken me until now, 7 hours later, to actually feel warm again.

We did mean to go to Dettifoss this afternoon but the light was rubbish and we'd overrun by an hour or so, so we are off there tomorrow.