The Bay Where a Whale Looks Back

One of Húsavík's former whalers once told journalists that heading out to sea in the morning still feels like the same old trade to him. Only the catch has changed. These days, what he brings back is people's wonder.

Húsavík sits on the edge of Skjálfandi Bay — the name means "trembling," earned from the frequent earthquakes here. Cold currents pull nutrient-rich water up from the seabed, turning the bay into a natural feeding ground. More than twenty species of whales and dolphins are regularly spotted here, blue whales and white-beaked dolphins among them. But the real star is the humpback. In summer, it's the one that leaps right beside the boat, sends up a spray that showers the passengers, and vanishes as suddenly as it appeared.

The town itself is far older than its reputation for whales. Back in the ninth century, a Swede named Garðar Svavarsson spent a winter in this bay, left a few houses behind — and a settlement took root. That's how Húsavík got its name, "Bay of Houses," and it's believed to be Iceland's oldest continuous settlement, older even than Reykjavík. For centuries the town lived on fishing and farming. Whale-watching only arrived in the second half of the twentieth century, as Iceland was moving away from commercial whaling.

Tour operators here are upfront about the odds of seeing a whale — as high as ninety-eight percent. The town is also home to the Whale Museum, said to be the only one in the world devoted entirely to whales, with everything from old harpoons to recordings of whale song.

One captain once admitted that when a whale circled his boat for several minutes, he felt, for the first time, less like an observer and more like the one on display.

If you leave with more questions than you came with, that was the idea. The answers and the map live at moygid dot online.