North to Alaska III

Sunset at sea - taken by Michelle

Hello again. When I last left my faithful readers (all two of you) we were departing beautiful downtown Skagway AK for our next stop - Icy Strait Point: a small Native Indian fishing village and site of a former cannery. The basic entertainment choices here were: a.) a hike in the woods b.) a trip on a whale-watching boat or c.) a form of insanity called a zip line in which you are driven up a mountain for 45 minutes in a bus, wait an hour in line and then spend 90 seconds screaming as you're strapped in a harness and slide down a wire cable for 1500 feet back to where you started. Needless to say, we went whale watching.

The old cannery at Icy Point Strait

The whale watching boat was a large twin hulled power boat that had three decks and was fairly comfortable and stable. The tour was accompanied by a young woman naturalist who told us about whales and what to look for, what we were seeing etc. We did see whales. Since summer is the time the Humpback whales migrate to Alaskan waters to feed (They're not dumb - they spend winter in Hawai'i) there were plenty of sightings. In fact, we got fairly lucky as a mother Humpback and her calf surfaced near our boat and put on quite a show of rolling over, splashing their tail flukes etc. All in all it was probably the best shore excursion we had taken to that point. It was also the best whale watching we have seen since the time we were in the Gulf of Maine outside of Bar Harbor and saw a rare form of cooperative action among Humpbacks called "bubble netting". It's a way the whales work together to herd herring into a small area for easier pickings. When Michelle mentioned that we had once seen this to the naturalist on this current trip she was boggled and pretty much said that behavior was so rare as to be a kind of holy grail for whale watchers.

A humpback whale breaches - picture taken by Michelle.

After the whale watching, we walked along the small boardwalk they had on the town waterfront, watched some of the lunatics come down the zip line, and ate some great fried halibut (halibut, along with salmon, is kind of the Alaskan national fish) in a small restaurant overlooking the water. It occurs to me that I may not be doing Icy Strait justice. It is a very beautiful spot scenically and worth the stop.

That afternoon, we set sail for the Hubbard glacier. We arrived there the next morning. The Hubbard glacier is located far up a bay. It is a huge river of ice, some six miles wide which makes its way many miles down a mountain valley and ends at the salt water bay. Since glaciers are always moving forward, chunks of it are always breaking off and falling into the bay, forming small "icebergs". Apparently in Greenland this happens with even bigger glaciers which form not so small icebergs and hence what happened to Titanic. However, our bergs were not so big or dangerous (fortunately). Of course our ship's captain, a Norwegian chap who fancied himself a comedian, started coming on the ship's PA system about 7:00 AM with reports on our progress toward the glacial face and a few lame Titanic remarks thrown in for good measure. Fortunately, he was a far better seaman than comedian and he was able to safely navigate our 90,000 ton ship to within 1200 feet of the glacier. In fact, we were told that this is supposedly closer than any other cruise ship gets. Since I used to struggle to get a 1 ton sailboat within two feet of a dock, I was duly impressed by this feat.

Our closest approach to the Hubbard glacier.

Needless to say, the view of the glacier was spectacular. We were close enough to hear the roar of the ice as it began to break off from the face, and to see the splash and puff of powdery crystals as the break actually happened. It was like being in the middle of a National Geographic special. Finally, though, the ship turned around and headed back down the bay and we were on our way to Seward AK, our final port.

Next: Weird shipboard entertainment and Seward to Anchorage to Fairbanks.