Ingólfshöfði Puffin Tour

The tours to Ingólfshöfði have been conducted by the family in Hofsnes since 1990 when the farmer Sigurður Bjarnason had given up traditional sheep farming and had time to try new ways to make a living on his farm. His son Einar Rúnar Sigurðsson started to help his father soon, and then Einar’s wife, Matthildur Þorsteinsdóttir, and their oldest son Aron Franklín. Today the trip is normally done by Einar or Matthildur (Matta) or their sons, Ísak and Matthías.
Cape Ingolfshofdi is an isolated headland on the coast half way between Skaftafell in Vatnajokull National Park and Jökulsárlón ice lagoon. This historical nature reserve is home of thousands of nesting seabirds, like puffins and great skuas. The cape is named after the first settler of Iceland, Ingolfur Arnarson, who spent his first winter in Iceland there in the year 874 AD. To get to Ingólfshöfði we cross 7 km of waters, marshes and sands in a tractor-drawn hay cart. The drive takes about 30 minutes each way, so we spend about 1 1/2 hour hiking around the cape. The circle we hike around the nature reserve is 2-3 km long. In the beginning we need to walk up a 25° steep sand slope, but then it gets more easy, mostly hiking on flat grass land and we make many stops along the way. We don’t recommend that people participate in this trip unless they can do this hike.

We have seen puffins on every trip from mid May until mid August since 2013 except for couple of trips with extremely high winds. 2010-2012 were very warm years, and the puffins did not do well because the sand eel and small capelin they need to catch for their puffling moved further north in the Atlantic, but since 2013 they have been successful in their nesting. In start and end of season we have to expect trips where we spot only few, and sometimes only down in the cliffs. The best time to visit puffin colony in hope of seeing lot of puffins in one trip is from late July until early August, but we have quite a lot of days that we see hundreds of puffins from early June until mid 10th of August or so. In our experience the best puffin days are not the perfect sunny calm and hot days, but moderate wind, and even a little rain can often have more of them hang around the cliff edges, especially in the afternoon. Late morning, early afternoon is often the best time for having many of them at home. However we can never really know how many we will see on each given trip, there are many things that influence if the puffin wants to stay on the cliffs, or go down to the sea for the day. How close to the cape is the fish that they need to eat, how is the visibility in the sea for diving, how warm is it this afternoon, and what time of the summer is it are but few questions we need to consider. So even if we have 1000 puffins sitting around the cliff edges in one departure, the next departure on that same day might have only 10, or vice versa. Bottom line, the trip is in a nature reserve, not a zoo, so we can even have days in end of July with very few or only one puffin to spot on the tour. We call the tour Puffin Tour instead of Puffins Tour just in case :-)