Finally
The Humpback Whales are here!
Hi. It’s been a while since our last post. Sorry for the delay, it has been an interesting two weeks. First of all we started to be worried that the whales don’t come here this year. Looks like that the season is delayed for a few weeks. Usually by the end of October the herring swim into fjords (in the last three seasons it was Reisafjord & Kvænangen area) which attract the orcas and humpback whales...and also the fishing vessels. But this year of course it is different like everything else. Why it wouldn’t be?
We moved to Skjervøy, as I wrote earlier, in the middle of October and we have been ready since. Then we were waiting and waiting. At the same time the vessel tracker apps were showing that the herring fishing activity is way too far offshore (between 40-60 Nautical Miles) from Andenes and Senja. Also we heard news from fishermen who are out there that plenty of orcas are all around them. It’s great…which it actually isn’t… 🙁
We started to feel that all these efforts, like moving to Skjervøy, were done in vain. We were loosing hope. On the top of it the weather is also just crap! Seriously, there are storm after storm. Maybe one nice quiet day in between two. On these days we can get on our boat and go out at see searching for the whales. But there were no sighting until the 1st of November. When finally someone from his living room window spotted some humpback whales not far from the entrance of the harbour! Excellent! This lifted up our mood and brought back our hope. It looks like the full moon had also effect on this. Unfortunately, the next day (2nd of November) the weather forecast still predicted strong wind.
For Tuesday the wind eased a little so we decided to go and look around Skjervøy. There were some news about humpback whales behind the island. We didn’t waste time and went straight there...at least we tried first approaching from the North side. But as soon as we left the protection of the island the westerly wind hit us on hard. We got some refreshing seawater spraying on us. Okay, I turned the boat quickly and drove clockwise around and finally arrived to the spot. In this strong wind and with white capped waves it is very difficult to distinguish a breath of a humpback whale to spraying seawater. So we looked carefully and suddenly Krisztina spotted WHALEs!!! The first ones in this season which were seen from a whale watching boat! We were relieved. Our guests were happy.
The conditions were not the best to film or to take photos because water was coming from below and above. Of course it was raining too. But Krisztina managed to take some pictures and I could use the GoPro to record some moments of the day. We started to work on the first episode which is going to be available shortly on our channel. Sorry for the delay but the nature sets the timing, not us. 🙂
We ended up seeing several humpback whales in the area and spent almost two hours observing them. Some actually were swimming toward Skjervøy quite close to the harbour where we waved goodbye to them for the day.
Enjoy this short video summary!
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