About a week ago Óli (Ólafur Ármann Sigurðsson) started working as a captain on our RIB speed boats and is since then going out for our “GG2 Big Whale Safari and Puffins”-tours. Before being allowed to sail into the bay on his own, he underwent a training, which was carried out by our head captain Sverrir Yngvi Karlsson.
Before Trina started to work as a guide for Gentle Giants last summer, she studied marine biology at the University of Southampton. In her final thesis for the master degree, Trina happened to write about the bird, which Iceland is most-known for: the puffin! However, there is a lot more to know about these cute and charming little birds that visit our bay for a few months each summer.
This past week was the annual “studying marine mammals in the wild” course run through the University of Iceland. There have been students joining us at Gentle Giants on many tours to learn and take data on photo identification, whale tracking, acoustics, and whale behaviour.
When you decide to move for the first time to Iceland in order to work as a whale-watching guide, it is something vocational. You know that it will be a tough life: your summer will be colder than you are used to; working on board in bad weather conditions tests your courage; and you are far away from everything you know.
Every year by the end of May a well-known excitement is spreading over the bay and harbour area of Húsavík. Any day now the first migrating blue whale might reach the waters of Skjálfandi Bay, likely staying for a short stop-over to feast on the plankton and krill which the bay has to offer – after all a blue needs about 5 tons of food a day whilst visiting its feeding grounds.
Previously this week we had the pleasure of taking a group of Icelandic school students to beautiful Flatey. This time of year in Iceland is when the school year in Iceland ends. It is not uncommon for grade schools in Iceland to go on a school trip to celebrate the end of another semester.
Last week the cruise ship “Ocean Diamond” started its annual sailing route around Iceland. Which means that every ten days it comes for a visit here in Húsavík! The passengers gets the chance to experience the town, and of course to see the whales here in the whale watching capital of Iceland.
During the past days numerous humpback whales have started to arrive to Skjálfandi Bay – ten and more individuals were seen on the tours! Humpback whales come here for their feeding season and usually start to show up sometime in spring.
These are screenshots from a trailer for the American TV show Ocean Treks™ with Jeff Corwin, when he joined our humpback whale researcher Charla Basran on board our boat Aþena to learn how the study of whale vocalizations can help to understand the gentle giants better.
One of the humpback whales that has been encountered in our bay during the last days is this pretty and unusual one with black pectoral fins, named Flatbread. This photo was taken yesterday morning by our guide Natàlia while it let the people on board our oak boat Faldur admire its whole body's beauty up-close.
