Seward & Homer, Alaska

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Another 171 miles and we were in Seward, a small harbor town near the Kenai Fjords National Park. We were here for two nights, so we booked another 6 hour cruise through the Kenai Fjords. I'm sure Jim did this mostly for me, but he was a good sport about another long boat ride. We had another beautiful sunny day to be back out on the water, and ended up seeing lots and lots of sea life. In fact, we saw so many whales that I lost count. On this trip we saw orca, humpback and what the crew said some rare sightings of two fin whales. It was great! Again we pulled up near a tidal glacier to watch as pieces fell into the water. What a change in temperature as we got closer ... not cool, down right cold! Because this was a smaller boat than our previous tour we were able to get much closer to everything and maneuver easier around things.

We traveled to Homer on Thursday for a 3 night stay. This time we are camped on what is called the "Homer Spit", a long narrow peninsula surrounded by water and snow capped mountains.

We booked a charter fishing trip for Sunday to fish for halibut. You have a 2 fish limit, one being under 29" and the other can be over. Jim had the biggest catch of the day on our boat of 15. Eleven of those people were from our tour group and we had a great time being together, although some of us got pretty seasick. (misery loves company) I happened to be fishing next to Jim when he caught his big fish. I would have taken more pictures, but my biggest concern at that time was to be hanging over the railing of the boat .... as my kids/grandkids would say, "puking my guts out"! I did survive and got a couple of good pictures of Jim with his fish. I also caught my limit, one being 28" and the other at 31". Because we all signed up as a group, we decided to throw our fish all together and divide evenly. We picked ours up this morning, all cleaned, packaged and frozen.

We had another free day today, so after a group breakfast, we walked the harbor and the small gift shops before going for a ride around town and the surrounding area. To our surprise, we found a small golf course. I think our car automatically turns in to places like this. Jim got out to check things out and ended up talking with the superintendent. This guy, (Doug Hamer) did his internship at Augusta National in 2011. You can imagine they had plenty to talk about. What a small world!

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