We had left Minneapolis Intl at 7:30 PM and arrived at Keflavik Airport 6 hours later. I can never sleep on airplanes, so I was just starting to get sleepy when we arrived. By then it was 6:30 AM Reykjavik time, so it was to be many more hours before I would get to bed. And at noon, we had tickets to go on a whale watching cruise. The hotel let us into our rooms so we could deposit our luggage there, eat our free breakfast, freshen up, and catch a short nap.
Our whale watching boat was about 100 ft long, 25’ across the beam and 2 decks high, and had a humongous diesel engine. It was fairly calm, and we did not ride the waves—we blasted through them at 40 mph--so it was smooth as glass. After 40 minutes of this, after we had nearly lost all sight of land, the pilot cut the engine to a low idle, and we gently bobbed on top of the waves, quietly looking for signs of whales. Of course, the boat now pitched and rolled with the waves, and I expect a few became seasick.
They look for whales by looking for concentrations of sea birds above the water. The whales involved are baleen whales—filter feeders. Though they eat zooplankton, they can also feed on very small fish, which the sea birds also eat. So any crowd of birds usually means a crowd of whales. There are 11 kinds of whales in Icelandic waters, but we were looking for minke whales, a 30’ long baleen whale about a yard in diameter, which weighs several tons. Minke whales are solitary animals, but often gather around a rich food source. These whales are taken for food, and many restaurants in Reykjavik serve minke whale steak. After about a half hour of bobbing around like a cork, we still had seen no whale. I was beginning to get discouraged, thinking my bonus whale watching cruise would amount to a “carnival ride.” But then the whale spotter, on a platform above the top deck, shouted, “Whale at two o’clock, at 200 meters---whale at nine o’clock at 75 meters…..etc” I had hoped to get pictures of them, but soon realized this would not happen. You have no idea where they are going to surface, and when they do, they are only visible for about two seconds. By the time you get the camera aimed and focused, they’re gone.
What does a minke whale look like, at least, what does the part you are likely to see look like? Imagine that you have a huge black rubber inner-tube. And imagine that you glue some fins, like the dorsal fin of a shark, around the edge so that if you rotate it, it would look like a big saw blade. Now take all but 3 of the fins off, and make sure they are evenly spaced. Then take this thing and hold it under water, with it slowly rotating-- and every now and then lift it to where about a third of it is out of the water. Leave it there till the people watching see a fin rise gently out of the sea, and in a graceful arc, plunge back down. Then jerk the whole thing back under. That’s what a minke whale surfacing looks like. You see this black, arched back of the whale rise out of the water, and you see a fin rise over the top of the arch and plunge back into the sea.
As interesting as the whales were the sea birds. There were gannets, the largest sea bird in the North Atlantic. They look almost like gulls, but have a wing spread up to two meters.
When they hunt, they do not skim along the surface snatching up fish. They hover about 70 ft above the water, and when they see a fish, they fold in their wings and do a power dive straight into the sea, breaking the surface at 30 or 40 mph. It’s a pretty majestic show!
We continued watching whales till about 4:00 o’clock, and then the captain returned us to port in time for supper. (It was an adventure—but it did not make us late for supper.)
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