Real whales!

One of the most exciting things we did in Iceland was whale-watching trip out of Húsavik. We spent several hours in the bay of Húsavik in a wooden boat, looking for whales – and getting quite close to them!

The whales we saw were humpbacks. We found a pair of them who seemed to be feeding – making short dives of maybe 5 minutes, and staying close to the surface between dives – and followed them around for a while. The first sign of their surfacing was often a spout of water. After that they tended to swim close to the surface for a while, so we could see the top half of their body, one part at a time. When they were about to dive back down, they often flicked the tail (fluke) up high.

The head was as knobbly as it looks in the picture, and true to their name, they had a humped back (see photo #3). The long white flippers were very also very distinctive. All in all a very satisfyingly whale-like whale. Interesting factoid: the white pattern on the fluke is different for each humpback, like a fingerprint, so scientists are now able to identify and track individual whale by photographing their flukes.

Finding the whales turned out to be a matter of patience, experience and good eyesight. Many times our guide would announce a whale “11 o’clock, 1 km out” and none of us could see anything until the boat got to within a few hundred meters. Spotting was made harder by the fact that whales only stayed on or near the surface for a short while, and then disappeared, after which it could take anything from a minute to five minutes for them to come back up. Once she had spotted a whale, we would aim in that direction and try to get as close as possible.

When we were really close, the challenge was no longer to spot the whales, but to predict where they would come up next time. Since we were so close, even 100 metres could put the whales on the other side of the boat, so all sides had to be covered. And if we went in opposite directions, we could quickly lose our “close contact”. The captain seemed to have a sixth sense for predicting the whales’ direction. On several occasions, the whale submerged, and the ship puttered in what appeared to be a random direction – yet when the whale came up again we found ourselves in exactly the right spot.


Iceland used to have a whaling industry, but a moratorium was put in place in 1989. The whaling industry adapted quickly, and is now making good money out of whale-watching instead. (Our boat was a converted whaling boat.) According to our guide book, flags were at half mast in Húsavik when the moratorium was lifted in 2003 to allow whaling for “scientific purposes”. Apparently whalers have agreed to stay away from whale-watching routes, so as not to kill or scare away the whales who have gotten used to human presence.




Eric took the first 2 pictures (I need to get a faster camera!). And rather than edit picture #3 to straighten out the horizon, I left it the way it came out, as a reminder of how much the boat swayed when we were standing still, facing the waves.