Just across from where we stayed in the  The Planet Apartments is Reykjavik old harbour, there are a few different places running whale watching tours from the old harbour. But first it was time to eat! Sægreifinn – The Sea Baron restaurant is listed on Trip Advisor as a great place to get good value sea food and lobster soup with fast service.

As you can see from the outside it’s ‘rough and ready’, no frills here.

And on the inside there are still no frills, if it’s not too busy you’ll get a seat on a barrel at a wooden bench which you may have to share with other diners. If you don’t like the idea of this then it’s might not be the place for you. However you’d be missing out, to match the no frills building and furniture they have a lovely no fuss menu with good specials, free coffee and water.

I ordered lobster soup which comes with white bread and butter. It was good, hot, full of flavour with lots of lobster.

Leigh ordered a Salmon skewer with vegetables which was char-grilled, again really good. So well worth a visit if your in the area looking for a whale watching trip.So back to the trip.

We booked our whale watching trip on the Andrea which is listed as the biggest whale watching boat in Iceland, it seats 130 passengers and has large windows either side as well as open air seating\standing areas around the ship.

I sh*t you not people.. when we began to move out the harbour and with the added wind chill factor on that day it was colder than a really cold thing clinging to the end of a cold stick. Brrrrrrrrrrrrr

The tours sometimes run with two boats together which I think are owned by the same company. We did have another slightly smaller boat along side us with lots of freezing cold passengers scouring the sea for whale sightings.

By this point about 20 mins in to sailing out of the harbour I could hardly feel my fingers even though I had under gloves and then wind proof gloves over the top!

At this point the other boat kept stopping and looked like it may have found something. We slowed and began to follow..  and then a few minutes later we saw a fin and then a Humpback whale tale flip into the air it was huge!

Now I’d love to show you an amazing photo of this but instead I got the photo below. Sorry about that.

In the excitement along with my complete lack of zoom lens meant I have nothing interesting to show you other than a bit of a fin poking up. If you want to take half decent photos of whales on these tours bring a a meaty big zoom or a nice powerful prime (along with 5 pairs of gloves, thermal underwear and two hot water bottles).

Leigh however managed to get a brief but very low quality video..

That was filmed from a distance, so it’s bigger than it seems in the video.

Here’s the crew member pointing out Harry the Humpback on a chart afterwards. Humpbacks range from 12-16 meters and weigh about 36,000 kg! So our ship soon turned and headed back to port, the frost bite we had picked up on our extremities had all been worth it.

So after getting back and having an eggy Icelandic shower to warm our cold bits we headed back out for dinner. We had pre-booked a special table at Fiskfelagid as a treat, if you want to eat here I’d suggest you book in advance as it’s very popular and for good reason.

I can’t remember what we ate, although it looks like Salmon above. So you’ll just have to look at the pretty presentation and use your imagination. What we can remember is that it was one of the best meals we’d ever had.

I think the meal above was wolf fish..

It’s obviously not cheap at Fiskfelagid but the quality of food, the presentation made the whole experience worth while.

And look they give you your bill in a little flowery purse and they have a sticky note pad feedback wall! Thanks for reading, see you again.