For a change of pace today, I decided to join a whale watching tour out of Húsavik aboard the good ship Nattfari. It was a lucky decision. The beautiful scenery would have been reason enough to get out on the water. Our first sighting was a small pod of white beaked dolphins.

When the crew of our boat became hyper excited it was clear we were in for a rare treat. They had spotted a blue whale of which estimates place the total North Atlantic population at between 600 and 1,500.  At 100 feet in length and 200 tons or more in weight, it is the largest extant animal and among the heaviest that have ever existed. Our whale dove for about ten minutes at a time and then surfaced to blow its spout two times before diving again without showing its tail fluke. Spotters would look for the first spout (~40 foot high) and then we would race nearer to the whale. With luck you could get a shot of the second spout (~30 feet high) which I was fortunate to do.

Our final sighting of the day was a humpback whale which was far easier to track and photograph.

Hvítserkur is a basalt rock rising about 15m just off the coast of Vatnsnes peninsula in the north of Iceland. The birds, which rest and nest on the rock have deposited quite a few droppings, colouring the rock largely white, hence the name hvít-serkur which means “white- shirt”.  Sea erosion has carved out two holes in the rock‘s foundation, giving it distinct features resembling a petrified monster, an animal of some sort or a troll. An old tale says Hvítserkur was a troll from the Westfjords planning to break a church bell in a fjord a little further east but was caught by the sun and turned to stone.

On the way to Hvítserkur I encountered a beautiful church and a nice lighthouse …

… and about a dozen horses blocking a one lane bridge I needed to traverse. Unmotivated to move by the approach of my rented 4×4 Subaru, several of the horses began licking the hood. Naturally, I rolled down the windows so that I might better photograph this strange behavior (I think they were after the salt spray residue which had accumulated while I was parked by the ocean earlier in the day). I became less amused when one horse began nibbling at my windshield wiper and down right worried when he poked his head inside the car for a look around.  When he started to abscond with my camera bag, I  decided it was time to  nudge may way through the impetuous gang who continued to block the bridge.