Outdoor Adventures with Gary Lee - Vol. 369

This adventure is more than I can absorb every day as there are so many different things each day, birds, whales, sea lions, sea otters, glaciers, and mountains. So, I can only hit some of the highlights with photos and description as I saw it. Most of these things were new to me as this was my first time in Alaska, a place I always wanted to go but Karen wouldn’t fly after our last trip to Hawaii when we hit rough weather over Chicago and 9-11 was just shortly after that. She always said we could drive and I said if we had all summer and that never happened.

Now with much of my family it has been a treasure to see all these things with them. Cameras clicking, cell phones popping and cheers from them and sometimes the crowds around them as each of nature’s wonders passed by, swam by, flew by or the caving of a glacier were wonders that most had never seen and may never see again.

This is only going to cover today’s activities which cover many of these things. We are staying at Kenai Princess Lodge which was a short bus ride up from our Cruise ship at Whittier. We left the Lodge this morning after breakfast as we had a bus ride to Seward where we boarded a boat with over fifty other visitors. Leaving the dock with many other sight seeing boats we soon found some sea otters just basking on their backs right beside the boat. They didn’t have any young ones riding on their bellies as they drifted past the boat. Not far past them there was a pod of Killer Whales which were on both sides of the boat fishing. There was a mother and calf fishing to the right and big bull male on the left as his six-foot dorsal fin stuck out of the water. We stayed between them for about half an hour before moving on.

The next encounter we saw were a few sea lions basking on some rocks, but we passed by them as the captain had seen a large flock of gulls up ahead over a pod of Humpback Whales. When we got there all you had to do was watch the gulls gather as they knew where the whales were going to surface and the gulls could pick off many of the fish the whales pushed to the surface. One time four of the group pushed up to the surface at the same time with all the gulls gathered around. That was one of my best shots of the trip so far. I got many tail shots as these whales surfaced and went back down. Looking at these flukes, many of these whales can be identified as they come back year after year to fed in these waters.

We then went up to the end of this channel to the end passing by many small glaciers until the climax of a mile wide glacier where we turned around. We saw no caving from this glacier like we did on yesterday trip where that glacier caved for more than an hour.

On the way back to port, we stopped to see a large group of Stellar Sea Lions basking way up on the rocks. We did see a couple of big ones getting out of the water and working their way up the rocks. Close to there we saw the Humpback Whales and gulls again. Then part back to the port was saw Killer Whales once again fishing what a fun fill day of adventure.

A few more days to go and more things to see in this big state of Alaska but that’s another story. See ya.