Faxaflói Bay was hunted commercially within living memory; today its minke whales are counted, photographed and logged by the same skippers who once tracked them for other reasons.
The bay is a shallow, nutrient-rich basin west of Reykjavík, fed by glacial meltwater and Atlantic currents that meet over sand banks. That collision drives plankton blooms, which draw sandeel and capelin, which in turn draw minke whales, white-beaked dolphins, harbour porpoises and, in strong summers, humpbacks. Sightings are seasonal rather than guaranteed. The reykjavik whale and puffin watching rib boat tour departs into this water from the Old Harbour, a working quay that still smells of diesel and cod, and which sat at the centre of Iceland's twentieth-century fishing economy before it became the city's departure point for wildlife vessels.
Rigid inflatable boats changed the character of the trip. Where a conventional Reykjavik whale watching cruise carries a hundred passengers at nine knots, a RIB carries a dozen at speeds several times that, reaching the outer banks in minutes rather than an hour. Passengers sit on saddle seats in full flotation suits, low and close to the surface. The trade-off is exposure and spray for proximity and range. Faxaflói Bay RIB adventures and speedboat variants sold from the Old Harbour work on this principle, and the Reykjavik whale and puffin watching rib boat tour tour combines the whale grounds with a pass by the puffin islands.
Those islands are Akurey and Lundey — the second name means, plainly, Puffin Island. Together they hold tens of thousands of breeding pairs of Atlantic puffin between roughly May and mid-August, when the birds abandon their burrows and return to the open ocean for the winter. Iceland hosts a substantial share of the world's population of the species, which is classed as vulnerable. Colonies are watched from the water; landings are not part of these trips.
What gives the harbour its coherence is the shore-side infrastructure that grew alongside the fleet: the whaling and maritime exhibits, the ticket huts, the drying racks and the slipways. Admission to the associated museum is included at 24,490 ISK per adult, folding the historical record into the day on the water. Operations run daily, 09:00–17:00, from Old Harbour, Reykjavík, Iceland. Booking reykjavik whale and puffin watching rib boat tour tickets places a visitor inside a continuity that runs from harpoon to hydrophone in under a century.
2 hr
