So I recently got a new job as a whale watching guide in North Iceland on Ísafjörður, which is really, really beautiful.
And most of our tours there focus on humpback whales and minke whale sightings. So this was a new job for me in a new part of the world and some new cetaceans that I had never worked with and never seen before. So I spent the first bit of my time in training just watching the other guides going out on the boat as much as I could. And we had some seriously amazing sightings of humpbacks. We had surface feeding, lunge feeding, multiple individuals feeding side by side, some really, really cool stuff.
And then came my first day to guide on my own. And, I was obviously naturally a little bit nervous, had some first day jitters, but I started the tour, all was going pretty well. I was talking about the area a little bit about the geography, and we weren’t seeing any whales. So I was starting to get a little nervous at this point. And then I was getting more and more nervous as the tour was going on and I was sort of running out of information and I was worried that my first tour was going to be either a low or a no sighting tour.
And I was thinking like, oh, this is just my luck that my first time on my own would be this really tough tour. And just as I was kind of starting to mentally go over in my head how I was going to handle the situation and complaints from our passengers, I looked down from the guide box, to my right, and just beside the boat there was this dorsal fin that popped up really fast. And at first I just thought, oh, it’s a harbour porpoise, because we do commonly see them on most of our tours. And then I saw the whole body near the surface, realized it was not a harbour porpoise. And just as I was looking down, my co worker yelled over the radio, it’s white beaked dolphins.
So basically I screamed with joy. And everyone watched as this whole pod of them started coming up on both sides of the boat, kind of surrounding us. And then all of a sudden they were in front of us and they were jumping. They were putting on this amazing acrobatic display, spiraling into the air, like right in plain view of all of our guests, it was so incredible. And they really made the Tour go from 0 to 100 in an instant.
Everyone was so excited and the pod stayed with us for almost 30 minutes, really showing off before they disappeared further north. And, we did end up seeing a couple humpbacks too. So it turned out to be a really, really good tour after all. And it turns out I had nothing to worry about. I don’t think I stopped smiling until I went to sleep that night.
I had never seen these dolphins before and, now at this point, I’m still eternally grateful to them for really saving my tour that day and making my first day a really memorable one. And since then I have been lucky to see them a few more times and it’s very special every time because we don’t really see them too often. They tend to hang out a little further north of where our tours usually go.
And still, I’ve just never seen them quite as acrobatic as that first time where they were so close to us and really just jumping out of the water and putting on a great show. so that was definitely an experience that will stick with me for a long, long time as a whale watching guy. Really exciting day.
-Lindsey
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