Guernsey Press

The irony of whale-hunting Iceland

A VAST grey speckled shape appeared on the surface, blew a jet of water high into the air and started to dive, finally showing a small dorsal fin.

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A VAST grey speckled shape appeared on the surface, blew a jet of water high into the air and started to dive, finally showing a small dorsal fin.

The creature was huge, bigger than any whale I had ever seen.

'It's a fin whale,' an excited voice on the bridge of Minerva shouted. I relayed the information to passengers via the public address system with a caveat: 'I think it's a fin whale, but I am not sure.'

John Plummer, who took the telling picture on this page, showed it to me on his iPad a few minutes later. As I had suspected, it was a blue whale, the first I had seen.

The news was announced later in the day at a lecture I was delivering on the whales and dolphins of Iceland.

And here is an irony. Iceland is one of nine countries which still hunt whales, despite having a thriving whale-watching industry and thousands of tourists who hate the idea of slaughtering the sea mammals.

Blue whales are enormous. Three big ones weigh the same as a fully loaded 747-400 jumbo jet including fuel, passengers, luggage and cargo.

Minerva's master, Captain Giovanni Biasutti, has seen many in Antarctica but this was his first northern hemisphere encounter. Sadly he was in a meeting and, I think, had only a glimpse of the animal.

We, on the other hand, saw it several times as staff captain Alex Dubov turned the ship and slowly approached the whale from behind.

The size was mind-boggling. Not only did its back seem to go on forever each time it broke the surface, but it was broad, too. The whale was at least 20ft across the shoulders.

The blue whale is the largest animal ever to have lived on Earth. When classified, taxonomists gave it the scientific name Balenoptera musculus, the 'mouse-like whale', as a joke.

John Plummer's pictures show the backbone quite clearly, indicating that this was probably a female which had not fed since calving some months before.

All her bodily resources had gone into feeding her offspring milk, for whales are mammals, hot-blooded, breathing air, giving birth to live young which they nurse through mammary glands.

They feel pain too and no method of killing them is humane.

After my lecture a passenger came up to me. Will Werry had worked on a whaler off Iceland in the 1950s. It was the reason he was on this cruise, to revisit the island.

I braced myself for the expected onslaught and criticism: all occupations have the knack of recruiting employees as advocates despite outsiders' perceived criticisms.

'Nobody who has ever been on a whaling boat could ever deny that it is the most barbaric way to treat living creatures,' he said to my surprise.

'I have seen whales take hours to die, bleeding profusely from every orifice. It is cruel beyond belief.'

Later in the cruise, while visiting Akureyri, some of the passengers opted to do a whale-watching trip out of the nearby port of Husavik on the edge of Skjalfandi Bay.

All roads from Akureyri lead to the spectacular Godafoss Falls, where King Thor threw his pagan statues into the river.

All the tours that left the ship that morning called in at the falls for at least a quick viewing, even the whale-watchers' trip which I accompanied.

On arrival at Husavik we had free time in the Whale Museum, which was interesting, adding flesh to the bones of my talk the day before. Seeing skeletons of whales was illuminating, although the building was not large enough to house a blue whale.

Our local guide had told us that minke whales had to be culled because local fishermen said they were eating cod and herring stocks. She seemed pleased with this argument until, as the other passengers were looking around the museum, I tackled her.

'How expert are the fishermen as ecologists?' I asked. 'Are they the representatives of an industry which has wiped out cod and herring stocks throughout the north Atlantic?'

I reminded her of a herring fishery which saw some fjords so full of boats people could walk from one side to the other hopping from one deck to the next.

She looked a little sheepish and I let her change the subject.

We motored into the bay on converted fishing boat Nattfari with most of our party well placed above a crowded main deck on monkey island – the observation post used by her main whale-spotter.

Puffins, Arctic terns and skuas were soon being watched until the training I had given our passengers kicked in and they started pointing out minke whales to the spotter.

Four or five were seen during the morning, some quite close, before we went a little further out looking for humpback whales.

These too were found and again we enjoyed good sightings. One surfaced so close to the boat that those on monkey island (the top deck on a ship) could look down its blow-hole while ship's singers Gareth Morris and his wife Claire Watkins, who stood downwind of the spout, were showered.

We returned to Husavik via a huge puffin colony on Lundy Island, where a white-beaked dolphin was seen briefly in the company of many thousands of birds.

After a good lunch of freshly caught cod we returned to the ship via the Godafoss Falls, a local highlight to be enjoyed by every visitor to the town.

It was a fitting end to our Iceland visit and it was with reluctance that Minerva slipped her mooring and set off for the Faroes.

Those on deck between 11pm and 1am enjoyed our brief sojourn over the Arctic Circle in beautiful light with spectacular cloud formations. It was late enough in the year for the sun to set, but it did not get dark before it rose again.

I was left to ponder on a fascinating group of islands whose people stubbornly refuse to change their exploitation of nature (roast puffin is a popular dish in smart Reykjavik restaurants and thousands of birds are killed annually) at great cost to the economy.

The Travelling Naturalist, for whom I do the majority of my tour-leading, and other tour operators have great difficulty in selling tours to Iceland as people still boycott the country because of her record on whaling.

Things are looking up, however, as Iceland can no longer sell its whale meat. Japan has recently cancelled an order as that blinkered nation has more than 30,000 tonnes of the meat (all in the name of science, of course) in deep frozen storage.

We can only hope that sense prevails and the Icelanders choose spotting rather than killing.

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