Day 3: Braving the seas

I love whales – always have – and so there’s no way I could pass up the opportunity for a whale watch in the self-proclaimed whale watching capitol of the Arctic, so the main focus of today is getting to Húsavik for a booked boat tour.

Just north of Húsavik is a bay that experiences frequent small earthquakes. This shaking action liberates a lot of nutrients into the water which, when combined with many hours of summer sunlight, create an algae boom which in turn creates a krill boom which in turn attracts hungry whales. This bay regularly sees 11 species of whales each year ranging from the rather diminutive Harbor porpoise to the incomprehensible massive blue whale (OMG, to see a blue whale in real life – I’d shred my entire life bucket list for that!).

We started the cold and rainy day with a quick stop at the Viðimýri Turf Church – a stop we missed the day before. I don’t think I’d ever seen a turf building before (maybe in Scotland? I don’t recall any, though). It’s an interesting way to construct a building. It wasn’t open so we couldn’t go inside, but I have to imagine that all that turf helped to keep the little church cozy during the cold and windy days.

I’m very glad we got up early, because the map I had placed the whale watch location just a tad bit (45 minutes!!) away from the actual location. We parked, donned our rain pants and hats, waited in the longest and slowest-moving restroom line imaginable, then headed to the dock to board our boat, Sýlvia. As we boarded, we got waterproof overalls and raincoats, creating a comically gear-plumped Kurtz-McCullough family.

The tour company I picked uses old fishing boats, so even the ride out to sea was filled with daydreams about what it would be like to work on a vessel like it. Not really dreams, I should clarify, as I hate boats and the ocean and would prefer to clean snake cages for a living over anything involving ocean voyages, but I still had images of folks in orange rubber overalls hauling in wriggling cod (and maybe a thought or two of pirates).

It was a lengthy ride out to the bay (80 minutes), but almost on queue a whale appeared. The thrill of seeing the dorsal fin and broad back of the whale as it dives down to collect a mount haul of food never dissipates. How something so large can move so gracefully is amazing. The flukes raise up last, then disappear under the water’s surface silently. It is truly amazing.

On the way back, a pod of white-beaked dolphins played in the wake of our boat. They were quite acrobatic, leaping from the water, but moved much too fast for photos. The guide kept saying there were babies (and I believed her), but I seemed to miss seeing them every time. 😦

We had lunch in the van/kitchen/bedroom, then hit the road. Last stop of the day was Goðafoss waterfall. This is a pretty good-sized fall, although not anything astronomical by Icelandic standards.

We were able to walk around the top of the falls, as well as down to the bottom, and seeing it from both vantage points was pretty cool.

Anna-Sophia and I enjoyed playing with our camera settings and photographing the falls, and we walked around some, but the crew was hungry and tired so we were soon off to camp.