Alaska 2015 - Day 35 - Seward

Day 35 – 6-15-15 Monday Our neighbors were as quiet as church mice last night. Someone must have educated them on the campground rules. There is Norwegian Cruise ship docked here this morning. The one from yesterday left at 8PM last night.

We ate breakfast and walked to the boat harbor to wait for time to board the boat for our National Park Boat Tour. We checked in and began boarding at 9:30AM for the 10AM departure. The boat was named Orca Voyager. It was 86' long and had 2 – 2500HP Caterpillar engines and could cruise about 30 MPH with 150 passengers. Today's trip had about 130 passengers. We got on the top open air deck so we could see better. It was a beautiful day to be on the water - warm sunshine and calm waters. The scenery was amazing – snow capped mountains – glaciers - small islands that were nothing but huge massive rocks and trees. The captain told us the water depth in some areas was over 900'. The crew served us a box style lunch around noon and soon after we began to see small ice bergs floating in the water. Captain Eric had to maneuver around some of the floating ice. Then the Aialik Glacier came into view. It was massive. The Captain got up close as he could and still be safe from any calving of the glaciers. We saw it calf (large chucks of ice falling into the water) twice. The second time it sounded like thunder before the ice broke off. The water temperature was about 40 degrees near the glacier. He maneuvered the boat so everyone could get good photos. Then we began making our way back. We stopped and got off the boat at Fox Island for our buffet dinner of Prime Rib and Alaskan Salmon. We don't care much for salmon but the prime rib and other food was very good. We had some time to walk on the beach before boarding for the end of the trip. The beach was not like the beaches we are accustomed to. Rather than sand it was flat smooth dark gray rocks about the size of your hand and smaller. Great for skipping rocks over the water.

We got back to the dock at 6:30PM. We can't name all the different birds we saw but we did see Shearwaters, Gulls, Cormorants, Kittiwakes, Puffins and Bald Eagles. We also saw 3-4 Humpback Whales, lots of Sea Lions, Sea Otters and Dall's Porpoises. It was a great trip.

Orca Voyager

Humpback Whale tail in the distance

Sea Lions

Aialik Glacier

Us & Aialik Glacier

WW II Lookout facility on top of rock

Sea Birds

Bald Eagle

Sea Lions

Docking at Fox Island

Fox Island Beach

Rocks on Fox Island

Orca Voyager

We have lots of photos of what we saw and have posted a few. The photos are good but you just can't capture in a photograph what we saw today.

I talked to one of our neighbors at the campground about the wild fire that is burning at Willow a little North of Anchorage. They have closed the Parks Highway that comes through the area and evacuated some of the people in the area. We came through that area on the 4^th but will not have to go back that way. We depart here tomorrow and work our way to Valdez.