So on Monday, we are scheduled to go on the whale watching tour from Juneau. we get up and eat breakfast and do our normal cruise ship routine. Then when it's time, we head to the Solstice theater to meet our excursion group. We end up being group Orange 17. We get our pass and head to the pier, where our guide gets us all together to get on buses. There are a LOT of us. Two huge buses are filled with us.
We file on, wait a while, then get underway to the Whale Watching location. Our bus driver is a darling young woman who looks like she weighs 100 pounds soaking wet. She's just here for the summer, for the work. Apparently, most of the people on the pier that work for these excursions are non-locals. She talks non-stop while she drives us in this huge bus.
We see lots of bald eagles on the drive and she tells us about Juneau and about the tides here and the economy. There's a tugboat in the harbor that's abandoned. She says it belonged to a man that lived on it but couldn't pay his slip rent, so one night someone cut her loose. She's now floating, and no one will salvage her because it will cost $500,000 to do it. If it slips under the bridge towards the ocean, it becomes the city's problem. But for now it's ignored, although some locals want to decorate it with flower pots and things. Funny.
We finally get to the docks where we will board the whale watching tour. Robert and I load up on the St. Juvenaly with what's known as the Peter Crew. It's a nice boat with a lot of plexiglas and glass for viewing. There are a dozen crew who double as hosts, nature specialists, and guides. They all look like they're from 18 to 25, not much older. We head out into the ocean from Auke (OCK) Bay and head north. There are a lot of boats in the harbor, but eventually it works to our advantage and soon you'll understand why.
We see a spout in the distance and our captain heads for that area. The spouts are the sprays the whales shoot straight into the air, and they last a long time. They dissipate pretty slowly. So we head to that spot and so do the other boats, gently encircling the suspected whales. They explain it's fine since the whales can go very deep and so the boats aren't concerning to them, when they congregate. We start seeing the whales playing, breaching, diving, and spouting all over in the middle of the boat circle.
The whales are gorgeous, and I even manage to get some fantastic pictures of the tail of one called Sasha. She's a resident whale with a scar on her tail in the exact shape of the letters A and K. (AK = Alaska) I have so many great pictures, at one point, I decide to just put my pretty phone away and enjoy the whales. We start seeing whales everywhere, including a mother and her baby. The baby is playful and he splashes around like a puppy in a bathtub. It's adorable. I'm not sure why it's so exciting to see the whales, but it is. They are such incredible creatures.
Whales only sleep about an hour a day, and they shut off half their brains while they sleep, so they can still surface for air. They eat the other 23 hours a day. Like humans on a cruise ship. We all yell and point out the whales and everyone runs to one side of the boat to watch some, and then we all run to the other side to watch others. We are all just so enamored.
The sun is out, which is rare, and we are surrounded by gorgeous Alaskan mountains that are covered in snow. The ocean air is seriously cold but none of us mind. When the tour is about done, the captain takes us back to the dock. He says we've just seen an incredibly rare amount of whales, which would normally takes weeks' worth of whale watching. Indeed, we talk to people later that saw nothing like what we saw.
The next leg of the tour takes us to Mendenhall Glacier. We get off the bus at what looks like a park, and we all get to choose what paths we walk around the area. It's a national forest really, being part of Tongass National Rainforest, so we all disperse and choose whether we walk to the lake, the glacier, the waterfall, or a trail through the salmon runs. Robert and I almost choose to walk the star trail but instead walk to the edge of the lake where we can see the glacier and the waterfall very well.
Turns out, a small group from our bus walks the star trail and runs into two hefty black bears. We saw the photos and video. There is a flurry of NPS guides headed that way to warn others. I can't decide if I'm glad or not that we didn't go that way. We did get a good stretch of our legs with about an hour's walk through the national park, and we met some neat people along the way. The glacier itself looks so tiny, until you see the helicopter tours leaving the site and realize they are MINISCULE. The glacier is huge.
No comments:
Post a Comment