Just picture whales floating by

My time here in Iceland is winding down quickly, I have fewer than two weeks left on this island. But just because our time here is becoming short, it doesn't mean that we have fewer things to do! There are a number of side-effects to the dwindling days. The signs of late summer are beginning to show in the vegetation and animals. Green, green grass is becoming a bit yellowed, most of the birds are off their nests and the ducklings are getting larger and larger. The length of the day too is shortening. No longer is the sun up for a full 24 hours. For the first time since May, there is darkness at night. The darkness is short, but increases by about 7 minutes every night. It was quite striking as we drove home from field work in the North to crest a hill see street lights on in the village below. We may even see some stars before we leave. A side effect of the waning of the midnight sun is the arrival of a real sunset. As of late, the sunsets have been spectacular.

A view from the mountain above Húsavík

As a result of our realization of our imminent departure we are scrambling to check things off our list of stuff we wanted to do while we're here. One of those things was to see a whale. Last time we went whale watching, all we saw were some dolphins, and while cool, they aren't whales. Luckily, we had reports from an acquaintance of ours who works for the whale watching company that blue whales had been spotted in the bay near Húsavík, which was quite fortunate, because Bre, Jamin and I just happened to be heading north to check our transects for the last time, and take down the sampling sites. We worked in the morning and at lunchtime we talked to our friend and got on the tour he was guiding. We were quite excited because it was a beautiful day, and we had a chance to see some whales. After about an hour and a half motoring out of the bay we spotted some dolphins going crazy! There were about 20 of them and they were doing these aerobatic jumps! We were really far away unfortunately, but it was still really cool to see.

We kept on going and finally we saw a whale surface. It was about 100m from the boat, and it surfaced about 3 times, and dove back down for about 10 minutes. We were a bit disappointed because there was no way that this was a blue whale. It was quite small, probably more along the size of a minke. But it was still cool to have seen a whale. 

And then this hulking mass of a whale surfaced 10 minutes later, and right beside it was the small whale. It was a blue whale and its calf. These pictures really offer no frame of reference as to the size, but this link shows a picture with a scale diver. The size of this whale and its calf was just incredible. Not only were we all able to check something off our list of things to do in Iceland, we all checked something off our list of things to do in life. We had seen the largest animal to ever exist. It was really breathtaking.