Friday 21 June 2013 Juneau, Alaska

There was a time change to Alaska Time overnight. Despite gaining an hour, we still weren’t up until 9:30 (10:30 PST). It must have been all the dancing, although Celeste was awake several times during the night. After breakfast we took a walk outside, caught the end of a talk about excursions, and I caught up on the blog while Celeste took a nap. We docked in Juneau at 1 and made our way to our shore excursion meeting point. Our driver told us there are often four or five cruise ships in port per day. We were the fourth ship today.

First stop on the tour was the Mendenhall Glacier Visitors’ Center. We took a short walk to a photo point and took in a 15 minute movie in the theatre.

 

From there we went whale watching. There were clouds of Bald Eagles around the dock.  OK, maybe not clouds, but there sure were a lot. Our boat was new last year and built for fifty people. That morning they had had groups of thirty and forty. Our group had eight. We had full run of the boat and could easily move around as the spirit moved us. Normally, they see individual humpback whales and observe them from a respectful distance. Such was the case on today’s earlier trips. However, on our trip we encountered a group of about 7 whales “bubble net fishing”, which they assured us was fairly rare. In this behaviour, one whale swims in a circle under a school of small prey fish, emitting a curtain of bubbles around the school, corralling them. Then the other whales in the group swim up from the bottom, driving the fish to the surface. At the surface the whales “inhale” the trapped fish and expel the water. It was quite amazing to see several whale heads break the surface at the same time.

We watched them execute this behaviour about a dozen times. At one point, when they broke the surface, they turned and swan directly towards us. A couple of them got to within about fifty feet before the group dived again. Of course, that is the precise time when my camera battery died. I had intended to charge it last night, but forgot. Fortunately, one among our group was an Australian lady living in Vancouver who had a fancy camera with a telephoto lens. I cried on her shoulder and she promised to send me some of her photos. I will append them if and when I receive them. The boat crew was pretty excited. They said that is pretty much as good as it gets.

From there we went to the Gold Creek Salmon Bake for a meal of salmon cooked over an open fire, baked beans, potatoes au gratin, salads, corn bread, and salmon chowder. Deeelicious! From there we returned to the downtown for a bit of souvenir shopping before returning to the ship by 8:30. Then it was up to the Crow’s Nest for a drink and to jot down our thoughts on the day and download and sort through our pictures from the last week.

Weather: Clear and sunny with light wind. Temperature was in the high teens, maybe into the low 20s. The tour guides assured us that it was an unusually nice day.