Seward,
AK Part 2 July 6-11, 2016 All day boat tour.
Watching
the weather forecasts we could see, what hopefully would be a nice
sunny day, for an all day boat tour to see glaciers caving and whales
& other marine wildlife.
We
selected Major
Marine Tours for our trip. They offer tours from a 3.5 hour bay trip to an
8.5 hour trip to a more remote Fjord in a smaller vessel. We opted
for the 8.5
hour trip. We felt the smaller vessel would take us closer to
the glaciers and give better views of the marine wildlife.
Some of the tours offer a Salmon & Prime Rib meal. However someone in a blog mentioned that the meal was scheduled during the stop at the glacier, when you would want to be outside watching for the glacier to calve.
It
turned out to be a great trip. We saw several orca whales, humpback
whales, one of which breached about 12-15 times for us, a glacier
which calved a number of times while we watched, a couple of groups
of stellar sea lions and great scenery. All on a nice sunny day with
little wind.
Waiting
for the boat to arrive for our tour.
Leaving
Seward
In
Resurrection Bay. Beautiful water.
Orcha
Whales
A
view of the open ocean beyond the point of land in the distance.
The
captain was telling us this is one of longest stretches of open water
in the world. ~2700 miles to Hawaii, and ~9500 miles to the Antarctic.
Bear
Glacier
A humpback
whale feeding
The
whale would dive and release air bubbles, scareing the small fish
towards the surface
then
the whale will come up from below with it’s mouth open catching
the fish.
We
had a spectacular display from a young whale breaching a few hundred
yards from the boat. He must have breached 12-15 times.
It
was difficult to get good pictures, but here is a still photo of a
not very spectacular breach.
This
video is better
Moving
on towards the glaciers.
Even a picture of Sharon
A
very small iceberg. There were a number of these small icebergs with
weird shapes.
Approaching the glacier
Several
pictures of the glacier calving.
A
short video of the glacier calving
We even got to see a big chunk of a hanging glacier break off and fall or flow down the cliff. Cool!
Steller
Sea Lions
Link back to the Alaska blog index page.
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