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Published: March 5th 2008
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Wow, I can't believe how long it has been since I have updated my travelblog. Although I haven't done a whole lot of extensive traveling lately, there has definately been a lot of news to add to my blog. Life has been...crazy since last September. With roommate drama, school drama (somehow I got academically dropped after going to North Carolina), and some family sadness, I am back to keep updating my blog because this coming summer is going to be full of traveling!!
I have still been in Juneau, Alaska since last August though after my LONG roadtrip through Canada. Juneau is still one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. I still need to learn though...Alaska equals camera. There have been some early mornings over the past couple weeks that I've seen gorgeous scenery and haven't had my camera readily available. But some of the things I do have on camera include my first Juneau fishing experience. Since I had never been fishing up here, my friend Vicki and I decided to get our license, get some gear, and head for the water. We started with some freshwater streams, moved to a small lake, and eventually ended
up at some place down the road near Sunshine Cove that we decided to nickname, Point Vickari (pronounced "Vic" and "CAR- E" since only in Alaska do they pronounce Kari as CAR--E). It was a gorgeous little spot and so much fun to go run around on the rocks during low tide.
It was here, at Point Vickari, that I had two new experiences that I will never forget. Our morning had started out with jumping from point to point down the road and we saw some porpoises and some birds. As we got further down the road (for all those who don't know, the end of the road is about 30 miles from the ferry and then it just stops) we started to notice more wildlife. We even stopped at one point, looked out over the water, and saw whale spouts. When we finally ended up at Point Vickari, it was about an hour or two before sunset. As we stood there on the rocks (it was low tide so we were way out there) with our fishing poles, we started to notice whale spouts out across the channel. They had to be at least 500 yards away
me fishing
(Photo by Victoria Phillips) but you could definately tell that they were whales. And just by pure luck, they started breaching. It was the most amazing thing in the entire world to see a giant whale come completely out of the water and create a giant splash as its body smacked back down onto the surface. They continued breaching for about 45 minutes or so as they slowly started heading South. It was during one giant whale breach that the other "new" thing happened, I had a fish on my line. After fishing with a lure for an hour without a bite, I finally had a fish on. We pulled it up and didn't really know what type that it was. After some in-depth investigation later, we learned that it was a Pacific cod which is actually kind of rare to catch from shore. I eventually cleaned him and steamed him and it tasted kind of good. I'm still a big fan of salmon though!
We couldn't get any good pictures of the whales since they were so far away, but Vicki managed to capture some video of the whales and me as I caught my fish. She uploaded the video to veoh.com.
Random spot near Amalga Harbor
See the ferry way off in the distance between the islands? That was out in the Inside Passage! Check it out at: http://www.veoh.com/videos/v1197224St7yYw6Y (whales) AND http://www.veoh.com/videos/v1197795Bhn9NmFG (porpoises). One is of the porpoises we saw early in the day and the other is of the whales and us fishing at Point Vickari! If you look at about 4minutes and 30seconds into the whale video, you can see the whale breach between the two islands while Vicki is filming and see what a giant splash it makes. It must've been a HUGE whale.
So other than fishing with Vicki, I also got the chance to go out on "The Steller," a local trawler that does scientific research. My entire ichthyology class got to go one morning and besides getting extremely sea-sick (I know, a marine biology student getting sea-sick...kind of pathetic) it was an amazing trip. We caught capelin (which really do smell like cucumbers), Herring, Walleye Pollock, a Lumpsucker (so cute and so small), a squid (on accident in the net), and some jellies. It was pretty sweet!!
The rest of the semester was spent finishing finals, learning about a loss in my family, and going back to Idaho for Christmas. During the second week in January, I went down to California for a Memorial celebration for
my aunt that passed away in December. She is in my thoughts every day and sadly, I didn't get any pictures from that trip. I did "mark" my car with some "PJ-style" words though that I also recently took a picture of.
So now it is March and in the next week or two, I should be doing some scuba diving and getting some pictures from that!! The Alaska subtidal is definately something everyone should get to see. Hopefully the visibility will be good!! And this summer, I'm going to be driving across the U.S. to my research job at the University of South Carolina in Columbia so much more travel adventures to come soon!! For now, hope you all like the pictures of Alaska 😊!!
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April Ann
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WOW!!
I am so happy you started to do these again. I used to look forward to your travel blogs all of the time. I am so proud of you and your research job. From the looks of it, I am still missing out on not traveling to Juneau. I really want to come up now and "find" stuff to do. Nature's beauty up there looks too good to be true. I love you and am very proud of you. Can't wait to see another one =)