whalesAfter some camping and getting to know Alaska's State Bird pretty well
I traveled on towards Anchorage with a couple of moose sightings along the way :
I decided that going to Anchorage would instead be more camping, but this time, all the way down in Seward. I thought I'd split the difference between camping and moteling, and get a rustic cabin instead. Barebones, but electricity, heat and screens in the windows - this has been my "night" hideaway for the past 3 days (yeah, "night", tonite? sunset 12:06AM, sunrise 3:24AM woo-hoo!). This was midnight last night:
But I went to Seward to treat myself to a seacruise (woo-eee!).
8 hours on the highseas except the water was so calm it was amazing! Starting out of the harbor we immediately got a closeup view of a sea otter which we were to see everywhere, all day long
Next was a hillside where we spotted the unfortunate balance of nature, at the bottom of a cliff two eagles and a crow feasted on the remains of a mountain goat that took a tumble. Still up on the grassy slope a momma grazed while her kid lay comfortably :
On another hillside of a nearby glacier field, I finally got a snap of a wild bear foraging
Back in the water, we were also hopeful of sighting a whale or two even though this was not specifically a whale watching tour. As I understand it, the dramatic shot of a fluke fin is the result of a whale that has surfaced in order to dive deep. They typically have breached several times to take a breath and on the final surfacing, they break the rise more fully, and get the fluke extended to help make the deep dive where they will stay down for up to 7 or 8 minutes. The trick is it happens fast! We only saw one of those events while watch 3 seperate pods of Orca (killer) whales - no, I missed it! The best I got was this shot of one breaching with his dorsal fin up - they aren't huge animals, so sorry, this is no Moby Dick moment, LOL!
Farther in the cove we got our first glimpes of Harbor Seals - here's a pup that was sharing a rock with a dozen adults
Among the seals, the bull is always the largest and the most vocal, here one tries to herd his harem away from the boat
All the way in the cove we spotted a bald eagle who seemed to content himself with sunning on his own rock :
We ventured back into the open sea and around a peninsula to go check out a glacier, pay no attention to the cracking noise and splashing of tons of ice into the sea, there is no global warming here, move along!
Also in the bay which was clogged with floating icebergs, we spotted a momma sea otter with her pup :
We then headed out to some nearby islands to see some rookeries. I've missed seeing them in Ireland, but finally got to see a real live puffin!
On the rocks below, were colonies of Stellar Sea Lions, some seemed to live for posing for passing boats
Sharing the cliff ledges with the Puffins and the seagulls, were penguin look-alikes, Common Murres :
In the open water we spotted more spouting and rushed to investigate - reports were of humpback whales in this area, again, no dramatic fin slap or flukes, but we got to ease up among them for a few minutes before they took their deep dives
On the way back to Seward we met up two different times with Dalls Porpoises, black and white like the Orca whales, but the porpoise is only about 7' long compared to the 20' whale, while I missed the leaping in this still shot, I'll put a short video at the bottom of this entry of them as they 'ride the bow' of the boat
A last shot taken today as I took a trip up into the hills south of Denali, more glacier snow and lakes and this guy caught me by surprise - he was upended bottom feeding and I couldn't figure out what it was as I went past at 65mph so I slowed, made a u-turn, and saw my first Trumpeter Swan :
And last, the video of one of the Orca Porpie(?) Porpeese(?)Porpoises.
