Your Reykjavik Whale Watching and Puffin Tour Explained
Departing from Reykjavik's Old Harbour, this reykjavik whale watching and puffin tour crosses Faxaflói Bay toward the Akurey and Lundey islands, where Atlantic puffins nest in burrows through the summer breeding season. Minke whales, white-beaked dolphins and harbour porpoises are the species most often sighted, with humpbacks appearing regularly in warmer months. Onboard marine guides narrate each sighting, and hvalaskoðun crews log every encounter for Icelandic cetacean research.
Atlantic puffins spend eight months of the year on open ocean, coming ashore only to breed. Akurey, a low grassy islet roughly fifteen minutes west of Ægisgarður, carries one of the densest colonies within sight of any European capital: tens of thousands of burrows dug into turf barely a metre above the tideline.
Most reykjavik whale watching and puffin tour tours cast off from that same pier at 101 Reykjavík, on the working edge of the Old Harbour.
The harbour is engineered ground. Between 1913 and 1917, crews dredged the shallows and laid breakwaters of quarried basalt, turning an exposed anchorage into Iceland's first modern fishing port. Ægisgarður was built for trawlers, ice houses and salt. Wildlife sailing came much later. Iceland's first commercial cetacean trips ran out of Höfn in the early 1990s; Reykjavík operators, Elding among them, followed within a few seasons and rebuilt the pier's economy around observation rather than extraction. Elding is an early member of IceWhale, the national association that lobbies against whale meat sold to visitors.
Faxaflói Bay rewards that shift. The bay is shallow and glacially fed, and its plankton blooms draw sand eel and capelin, which in turn hold minke whales, humpbacks, white-beaked dolphins and harbour porpoises within a short run of the city. Much of the inner bay has been closed to whaling, and the same water now carries a fleet of reykjavik whale and puffin watching boats, from broad oak-hulled vessels to fast RIB craft. An iceland whale and puffin watching route is unusual in pairing two very different subjects — a mammal that surfaces for four seconds, a seabird that beats its wings several hundred times a minute — on one circuit of a single bay.
That pairing explains the format's spread. A reykjavik whale and puffin tour compresses Akurey's burrow slopes and the open feeding grounds beyond Engey into one loop, and the iceland whale watching and puffin tour has since become the country's most exported wildlife product, repeated in Húsavík and Ólafsvík. Commerce turned toward observation is what a modern reykjavik whale watching and puffin tour tour now trades on, with the Old Harbour fleet carrying carbon offsetting for well over a decade and reporting sightings to Icelandic research programmes.
3 hr
