Boatride

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Today was a most awesome and splendid day! We left Daisy at Aunt Jean's in the care of our cousin Brittie. We had reservations for a 6 hour boatride out of Whittier. We had to take the 11:30 tunnel time in order to make it to the tour boat on time. Carol and Art were impressed by the train tunnel! It was a drizzly, overcast day, and we hoped we would be able to see the glaciers! Onboard was a park ranger/naturalist who could explain some of the sights and the animals. It was warm and comfortable and a nice boat with a top deck outside for viewing. We set out on "the calm, protected waters of Prince William Sound" at about 1:15. The clouds were beginning to lift off the mountains around. There were high waterfalls every 1/4 mile down green cliffs. We stopped at one of the waterfalls that the boat could get right up close to. Rich and Carol saw a foot-wide red jellyfish while the boat was stopped there. Then the crew brought up a shrimp pot at a bouy from 300 feet deep with the most non-shrimpy shrimp I'd ever seen! While we continued along towards glaciers, we were called to our "dinner" - all you can eat Alaska salmon and/or prime rib with a buffet of other goodies. The fresh salmon tasted so much different and better than the frozen variety. There was free coffee and tea all day and also a bar. We ate in the nice, warm dining room while the ranger talked about the sights and the animals we were about to see. Ah, the good life!
We won't complain about lack of animals again, (We might mention it, but we won't complain.) because we started to see awesome animals!
We saw sea-otters lazing on their backs and eating their lunches. Then, hoooweee, we saw a small humpback whale blow and surface about four times! There were plenty of seabirds and they started to float by on little pieces of ice from the glaciers! Before long, we were seeing harbor seals on the ice-floes. The ranger explained that the seals felt safer in this bay near the glaciers because the orcas wouldn't come into this bay. The orcas' delicate hearing/sonar/echo-location can't stand the sounds of the glaciers creaking, cracking, and calving. Soon the Emerald Sea motored up next to Beloit Glacier and turned off its engines so we could actually hear the sounds. Wow! Some boats toot their horns to make the glacier calve off an iceberg, but this captain wanted us to experience nature taking its course without our help. It was a beautiful sight! Then we went around a corner to Blackstone Glacier. By golly, it had a black stone in the middle of it! The engines were turned off again after the captain maneuvered the boat so that everyone could get pictures of themselves in front of it. We got to hear the cracks and see some small "crumbles" go into the water. You could hear the floating chunks of ice hitting the metal hull as we sailed on. (Can a boat sail if doesn't have sails?) There were many huge waterfalls around the glaciers and falling over the cliffs
around them. We passed about 12 glaciers, but most of them were "hanging" and didn't go down to the sea.
As we headed back, we were called to the dining room for dessert and coffee or tea. They offered a yummy drink called a chocolate otter (I think). We all had one. Mmmm. After dessert, we passed Seth Glacier, but we couldn't see much of it in the clouds up the mountain. Our last stop was at the black-legged kittiwake rookery. Thousands of birds were nesting on the cliffs. It was loud and smelly, but interesting! We even saw some chicks in the nests. We learned that Kittiwake chicks will not jump off their nests or try to get away no matter how close a predator or a person gets because their flight instinct has been replaced by a stay-put instinct or they would fall off and die.
Oh what a splendiferous day!
We even were able to show Art and Carol the bore tide on the way back without even waitingfor it!

If any of you get a chance to go to Alaska and could only take one tour, do a cruise like this one. Oh, yes!

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Comments

[Jodie]

I love the photo of you two, and the photo of the Harbor Seals! Please blow up and frame both!