The best whale watching tour in Iceland: ten Reykjavik sailings, ranked

The hull. A large steel boat gives you a heated saloon, a toilet, a coffee machine and a deck that barely moves; it works a set part of the bay at about ten knots. A rigid inflatable does twice the speed, covers three times the water, and sits a metre above the surface with no shelter at all. A yacht sits between them: quieter, fewer people, a bar below deck. Nothing else about these listings matters as much.

The month. Puffins are on Akurey and Lundey from about May to August and nowhere near them the rest of the year. The aurora cruise sails September to April. Humpbacks are commoner late in summer. A perfect boat in the wrong month is a bad booking.

How much evidence is behind the rating. The classic cruise has 11,540 ratings. The yacht has 3,161. After that the numbers drop fast: 1,434, 841, 477, 426, 189, 173, 106, 56. A 4.1 across a hundred people and a 4.5 across eleven thousand are different kinds of fact, and we say which is which rather than sorting by score.

First time in Iceland, one boat trip, summer. The classic three-hour cruise at $97. Overalls, a saloon, a guide who narrates the bay, and the largest evidence base of any sailing in this harbour.

You want photographs. The RIB at $175. Eye level with the water, three times the bay covered, and no window between you and the animal. Two hours outside in a flotation suit is the price.

Somebody in the party gets seasick. Also the RIB, which surprises people. A rigid inflatable rides over a short swell rather than rolling through it, and you are in fresh air the whole time. The worst place for a delicate stomach is the heated saloon of a big boat.

You are travelling with small children. The puffin trip at $60. One hour, a short crossing to islands full of birds, and back before anybody is cold.

You want the whole bay and both animals. The RIB that does puffins and whales in the same two hours, at $186. It is the dearest sailing here and the best rated of the inflatables.

You are here in winter. The aurora cruise at $104 on a clear night, and the classic whale boat by day — it sails all year and still finds animals, with fewer people on board.

Húsavík, on Skjálfandi bay in the north, is the town that calls itself the whale watching capital of Europe, and the claim is not empty: the bay is deep, cold and rich, and humpbacks are seen there through the summer with remarkable consistency. Some operators run oak schooners rather than steel boats, which is a genuinely different way to be on the water.

What it costs you is a day. Húsavík is roughly a five-hundred-kilometre drive from Reykjavík, or a flight to Akureyri and an hour by road on top. For a traveller doing the north anyway it is the better sailing. For a traveller with four nights in Reykjavík it is a day of driving to improve odds that are already good.

The honest framing: Húsavík has the better bay, Reykjavík has the better logistics, and Faxaflói is not a consolation prize. It is a summer feeding ground with minke whales, dolphins and regular humpbacks, twenty minutes from a city quay, with a free second sailing if the trip is blank. If your route goes north, sail in Húsavík; if it does not, sail here without feeling short-changed.