Húsavík sits on the western shore of Skjálfandi Bay, a wide inlet on Iceland’s north coast that opens toward the Arctic Ocean. The town has built its entire identity around whale watching, and has become the reference point for the activity in Europe. The bay’s productivity comes from the meeting of cold, nutrient-rich currents that support the zooplankton and fish that in turn draw whales in reliable numbers throughout the summer season.

We left our campground with beautiful weather and drove towards Husavik seeing the snow caped mountains on the other side of the bay.

After booking our tour, we visited the Húsavík Whale Museum, housed in a converted slaughterhouse from 1950 on the edge of the harbour. The building’s history is not incidental — it processed whale carcasses during Iceland’s whaling period, which gives the museum’s current contents an added layer of context.

The collection focuses on cetacean biology and the history of whaling in Iceland and the North Atlantic, and is anchored by a series of full articulated whale skeletons suspended from the ceiling, including a blue whale skeleton that runs the full length of the main hall.

The museum also covers the history of commercial whaling in detail, including Iceland’s own industry and its complicated relationship with international moratoriums. Iceland resumed commercial whaling in 2006 after a twenty-year pause, targeting minke and fin whales, though the industry has contracted significantly in recent years due to reduced demand domestically and trade restrictions internationally. The exhibit does not avoid these tensions.

We went out on a RIB (rigid inflatable boat) one of the faster, open vessels that run alongside the traditional oak boat tours departing from Húsavík’s small harbour. The RIB experience is categorically different from the larger boats: passengers wear full drysuits, seating is straddle-style along the tubes, and the boat sits low and close to the water. It covers ground quickly, which means more of the bay can be searched in the same amount of time, and the low profile puts you closer to the waterline when something surfaces nearby. The tradeoff is exposure — wind, spray, and cold are all more immediate — but the proximity to the water when a whale surfaces makes it worthwhile.

The first sighting of the trip was a blue whale cow with a calf, and it set a standard that nothing else on the water that day was going to match. Blue whales are the largest animals known to have ever existed on Earth. Adults in the North Atlantic typically reach 24 to 27 meters in length and can weigh up to 150 tonnes. They were hunted to near-extinction during the twentieth century; the global population, once estimated at several hundred thousand, was reduced to perhaps a few thousand by the time commercial whaling was internationally restricted. North Atlantic blue whale numbers remain low and the species is still classified as endangered. A sighting in Skjálfandi is not routine even by Húsavík standards — blue whales pass through the bay but do not concentrate here the way humpbacks do, which made the encounter uncommon enough that the crew’s reaction made clear it was not an everyday occurrence. We have gone on several whaling watching trips and have never seen a blue whale before. This was unique.

The cow and calf surfaced together repeatedly. A blue whale calf at birth already measures around seven to eight meters and gains roughly 90 kilograms per day on its mother’s milk during the nursing period — the fastest growth rate of any animal on Earth. The calf stays with the mother for roughly a year before becoming independent. On the surface, the scale is difficult to process at first. The blue whale’s back seems to keep appearing for an implausibly long time after the head has already submerged, a slow rolling reveal of just how much animal is there. From a RIB sitting low on the water, with no hull between you and the surface, the effect is considerably more immediate than it would be from the deck of a larger vessel.

The humpback sightings came later in the tour. Humpbacks are the most commonly seen species in Skjálfandi and are well suited to observation — they are slow enough to track, surface frequently, and are given to behaviour that is visible above the waterline: rolling, slapping flukes, and occasionally breaching. Their baleen plates filter enormous quantities of small fish and krill, and in productive bays like Skjálfandi they can spend the entire summer feeding before returning south to warmer breeding waters in winter. After the blue whale, the humpbacks were still impressive — they simply had the misfortune of coming second.

Húsavík is a small town with around 2,000 people, and the concentration of quality in its two main draws, the whale watching and the museum, is disproportionate to its size. The combination of a morning in the museum and on the water in the afternoon covers both the living animal and the full biological and historical context around it.