Faxaflói Bay is shallow — much of it under 100 metres — and that shelf, fed by nutrient-rich Atlantic currents, is the reason whales gather within an hour of a European capital's downtown.
Reykjavik's Old Harbour was built between 1913 and 1917, dredged and walled with basalt to shelter a herring and cod fleet. For most of the twentieth century the quays at 101 Reykjavik handled fish, ice and salt. Commercial whale watching began here in the mid-1990s, when a handful of converted oak fishing boats started carrying passengers instead of catch. The shift was economic as much as sentimental: a live minke, counted across a season, out-earned a landed one. Today the reykjavik whales and puffins express cruise combo tour departs from those same working piers, alongside trawlers still unloading at dawn.
The bay's cast is consistent. Minke whales and white-beaked dolphins are the year-round residents; harbour porpoises move in tight, shy groups; humpbacks arrive on summer feeding runs. Overhead, northern fulmars and Arctic terns work the same bait balls the cetaceans do. Puffins are the seasonal counterpoint. Roughly ten million Atlantic puffins breed in Iceland — over half the world population — and the low green islands of Akurey and Lundey, a short run north of the harbour mouth, hold colonies numbering in the tens of thousands. The birds burrow into turf, raise a single chick, and are gone by mid-August.
The pairing of the two is a Reykjavik invention. Whale grounds lie west and north; the puffin islands sit on the way. Operators realised a single loop could cover both, and the combo cruise format followed. Speed made it viable. Purpose-built catamarans and rigid inflatables now cross ground that oak boats took twice as long to reach, which is why reykjavik whales and puffins express cruise combo tour tours exist in fast and traditional forms side by side.
Elding, sailing since 1995, remains the reference operator on this stretch of coast, and its vessels carry marine biologists who log every sighting. Those logs feed Icelandic research on distribution and stock. The company also runs carbon-offset and hybrid-vessel programmes, part of a wider industry argument that Faxaflói should stay a whale sanctuary. That argument is not abstract here: the same bay was, until recently, a legal hunting ground. What passengers watch from the rail is a working case study in how a coastline changed its mind.
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