Reykjavik cruise

Here is the thing the listings never say plainly, and everything else follows from it: Faxaflói is a feeding bay, not a route past the city. The whales that come here in summer are not passing through on the way somewhere; they are here because the bay is shallow, cold and full of sandeel and capelin. That is why a boat that leaves a harbour in the middle of a capital city can reasonably expect to find a whale twenty minutes later.

The commonest animal is the minke whale — eight or nine metres, dark, undramatic, and usually seen as a rolling back and a short blow. The one everybody hopes for is the humpback, which is bigger, slower, and the only one that reliably lifts its tail out of the water when it dives. White-beaked dolphins travel in groups and will sometimes ride the bow wave. Orca are seen a few times a season and are always a piece of luck.

What you should not expect is a guarantee. Sighting rates in Faxaflói run high in the summer months and lower in winter, and every serious operator here publishes the same policy: if nothing is sighted, you sail again free. That is not marketing generosity. It is an honest admission that some days are blank, and it is the single most useful sentence in any of these listings.

The hull matters more than the operator. A big steel boat has a heated saloon, a toilet, a coffee machine and a stable deck, and it moves at about ten knots. A rigid inflatable does twice that, sits a metre above the water, and has none of the above — you are outside for two hours in a flotation suit. Neither is better. They are different afternoons, and the seasickness-prone are usually happier on the RIB, which is the opposite of what people expect.

Two things run on their own calendars. Puffins are on Akurey and Lundey, the two low islands fifteen minutes out, from roughly May to August; outside that window they are at sea and there is nothing to see. The northern lights need darkness, so the aurora cruises run September to April, and they need clear sky as well, so they cancel often. Both are genuinely worth doing in their season and pointless outside it.

And then there is the rest of what leaves this harbour, which most visitors never look at: hand-line fishing with your catch grilled on deck before you dock, and the fireworks cruise on the thirty-first of December, when the whole city goes up at once and the best seat is in the middle of the water.

One last practical thing. Everything here leaves from the Old Harbour, a ten-minute walk from Hallgrímskirkja and five from Harpa, so a sailing does not eat a day. If the weather turns and your trip is cancelled — which happens — you are in the middle of Reykjavík, not stranded at an airfield.