Winter whale watching in Reykjavik: what still sails between November and March

The light. This is the biggest change and it catches people out. In late December Reykjavík gets a little over four hours of daylight, and it is low, gold and beautiful for all of it. There is normally one sailing a day around midday, and it is the one to book — a three-hour trip leaving at two in the afternoon comes home in the dark.

The weather. Winter cancels sailings. Not the cold, which is milder than most visitors expect thanks to the Gulf Stream, but the wind: North Atlantic depressions cross this coast in sequence, and a boat does not leave the harbour in a gale. Build a spare day into the plan.

The crowd. A summer boat carries a hundred and fifty people, all of whom want to be on the bow. A January boat might carry thirty. If you dislike scrums, this is the trade that makes winter worth it.

The animals. White-beaked dolphins are resident and are seen through the winter, often in large groups. Minke whales are around in smaller numbers. Humpbacks are scarcer. Sighting rates are lower than in July and they are not zero, and the operators’ free second trip applies in exactly the same way.

Nobody should book a winter whale trip expecting summer sighting rates. But three things make the cold months genuinely good rather than a compromise.

The light is the first. A midday sailing in December happens entirely in what photographers call golden hour, because at that latitude the sun never gets high. Faxaflói in that light — low gold on black water, with snow on Esja behind the city — is a sight no July sailing can offer.

The second is space. Thirty people on a boat built for a hundred and fifty means every passenger gets the rail, the guide has time for actual questions, and the crew are noticeably more relaxed.

The third is the double. From September to April you can be on a whale boat at midday and an aurora boat at nine that evening, from the same quay, in the same overalls. That combination does not exist in summer, when there is no darkness at all.

You board at half past eleven in the dark-blue light that passes for morning in January. The overalls go on over everything you own. There are thirty people on a boat built for a hundred and fifty, and the crew have time to talk to all of them.

The bay in winter is black rather than grey-green, and the light comes in low from the south at an angle that makes every wave crest visible. Esja is white behind the city. On a clear day Snæfellsjökull is a white cone on the northern horizon a hundred kilometres away, and it looks like something out of a different century.

The animals are quieter and so is the boat. When a group of white-beaked dolphins comes through — and they do, in numbers, through the whole winter — you are one of thirty people watching rather than one of a hundred and fifty jostling for the rail.

By half past two the light is already going. You dock in the last of it, walk five minutes into a city with Christmas lights on in the middle of the afternoon, and the aurora forecast for that evening is on your phone before you have taken the hat off.