DAY 275 Tuesday 10th JUNE 2008

Seward, Alaska (Miles to Date: 28330)

Another Alaskan summer’s day – cold with a low dank mist covering the mountains. Today is an early start, and we wearily raise ourselves from our slumber, grab a quick breakfast from the provision we bought at the local store and hit the road. The plan is to take 9 ½ boat trip from Seward up the Northwestern Fjord some 70 odd miles down the coast. The overcast weather puts some doubt in our mind on this endeavour but we have already bought the tickets so we committed to doing this.

At around 9:00am our boat glides out onto the calm waters of Resurrection Bay, a deep water bay cut by glaciers. The bay is surrounded by steep mountains (so we believe as they are not visible today) which butt up right against these frigid waters. As we pull away we have our first wildlife sighting, a very cute sea otter contentedly floating on his back as we cruise past him. These wonderful and endangered creatures were nearly hunted into extinction but fortunately are now protected, but fishing and other man-made influences to their environment still put these otters at risk.

We leave our otter friend behind and travel further down the bay. Our captain for the day is handsome (this is Karen’s opinion not Marks!!) and dry-witted uses his eagle eyes to keep an eye out for any more wildlife. Occasionally the radio sputters into life and tour boat captains further up the bay radio in potential spottings. After one such call we head towards the shore. Here we find a pod of Orca (Killer Whales) serenely swimming and hunting in the bay for King Salmon. Almost immediately as we pull to a juvenile Orca breaches (jumps clear of the water) and crashes back down. We all see this except Karen – who always seems to miss these. Truly wonderful! Our captain explains more about the Orcas and how they can be identified individually by their markings and how the pod can be identified by their calls. Unfortunately we cannot hang around too long as there is much more to see so off we head further up the bay towards to the Bay of Alaska and the open ocean.

As we get closer to the open seas two things happen – the wave action gets more pronounced and secondly we start to see whales. These are not Orcas this time (which are actually not whales) but hump back whales. Back in March we had down a whale tour in Hawaii to observe the humpback whales that visit to breed in the warm waters of the pacific during the winter months before returning north to their feeding grounds. We wonder whether if any of these humpback we see now were the same individuals we saw thousands of miles south of here – a romantic but unlikely prospect. It is difficult to say how many humpbacks we saw during this trip but it was probably between 15 and 20 – most were distant sightings but we were treated to one or two visits by these 40 foot long magnificent mammals much closer, perhaps 75 to 100 feet from our boat.

Jack and Emily were enjoying the ride. Jack was determined to demonstrate his man hood by staying outside on the bow of the boat for the whole trip. Despite this technically being summer in Alaska it was a raw day and he got absolutely frozen, but was determined to take this adventure head on and spent about 90% of the journey outside. Although we had to thaw him out at the end of the day. Emily, who sensibly like her parents, spent more time inside only venturing out to see sights before returning to the warm, spent most of her time befriending everyone on the boat. She stuck up a relationship with two ladies travelling with one of their grandchildren. At the end of the tour these ladies said how wonderful Emily was and we think they would have happily adopted her. It is amazing how much better behaved our children are with other adults!

Eventually we pass through the rougher open waters of the Bay of Alaska, around the Kenai Peninsula into the calm waters of the Northwestern Fjord. Our main purpose of coming here is to see glaciers. On a clear day glaciers can be seen high up in the valley and circs of the mountains – but today we have come to look at tidewater glaciers. These glaciers are descending from the vast Harding Ice Field high up the mountains, drawn by gravity these rivers of ice cut their way through to the edge of the sea where they crumble into the icy waters. There are three of four tidewater glaciers in this Fjord but the one we have come to see closer up is the Northwestern Glacier. As we approach the glacier the captain has to drop the boat speed as there are huge blocks of ice floating in the water which have fallen from the glacier. We spot grey specs on top of numerous of these floating ice raft, as we draw closer we see that these are actually harbour seals happily resting on their own frozen craft. The captain stops the boat for 15 minutes which gives us time to stare in awe at the magnificent glacier, which even on this cloudy day shimmers a cold blue a few hundred feet from us. This was the real goal this tour for us. 90% of the glaciers in Alaska are retreating at the planet warms and we wanted to see this marvel of nature whilst we still could. Every so often ice would break from the face of the glacier, an phenomenon known as “Carving” and crash into the sea sending us water high into the air. Sadly we all too soon had to leave and return back to Seward.

The trip back was thankfully uneventful. The route was a little different taking in some of the small, uninhabited rock like islands more remote from the mainland. Here are the habitats of the endangered Stellar Sealion communities and sea bird breeding grounds. The cliff walls of these islands are teaming with birds; horned and tufted puffins, auklets and the penguin-like murres. Finally we pull back into dock after a wonderful day at sea (despite the weather)