Saturday, June 30, 2007

Had to get up and get breakfast, then get stuff ready for cruise. Expecting rain again...Of course! we are going on a cruise! But not quite as socked in as it was in Seward. Caught the bus for the short ride over to marina. Boat pulled out about 10 a.m. It was some kind of open fishing day for seining for salmon and we stopped close to several boats at different stages of the procedure. It was really interesting. These kinds of nets are called purse seines. They have about 1200 ft. of net with floats on top and they are about 60 ft. deep with a rope through the bottom of the net. A small boat takes the net out in a horseshoe shape and then closes the circle as it returns to the big boat where they pass off the ends of then net. As they start hauling the net in, they draw up the rope on the bottom of the net and they bring it in in sections. They haul the net up to the side, open the hold, then pull a section of the net up and dump the fish in the hold. There is a guy at the stern of the boat that takes the net and floats and kind of folds them onto the deck at the stern. The other crew are the ones who haul the fish. It was very very fascinating to watch and I got some really good pictures, but then I screwed up the card again...so I lost those....oh well, I will get some copies from Barb. She takes lots of pictures also.

Right across from the city of Valdez is the terminus of the Alaska Pipeline - there are huge storage tanks and huge docks where they load the tankers. That would be interesting to see, but there are no tours there b/c of security reasons. We cruised through some beautiful shoreline then stopped for a while to watch a pod of 6 orca whales cruising the waters. Then on to Columbia Glacier. Turns out we could not see the glacier. The terminus of this glacier is closed off by huge ice bergs. We had to break our way through "brash ice" which is large areas of small chunks of ice floating on top of the water and got as close as we could to the glacier. All the ice we saw was just ice bergs. The glacier was behind them and as it was cloudy and raining a bit, we could not see it. However, the icebergs were very impressive. Seems the Columbia Glacier is melting at a very rapid rate and no one seem to know why...melting faster than others. Getting there, we went through several miles of ice berg filled water....small, medium and large. Very small icebergs (up to 15 ft) are called "Bergie Bits" and larger than 15 ft. are icebergs. There were seals and otters on some of the ice bergs.

After we left there, we headed on to Meares Glacier. Stopped to watch a couple of humpback whales (none breached) and had lunch. Going into Meares Glacier, we saw lots of sea otters (see pix) and got some good pictures of them - also harbor seals and a few pups. On the way back we again watched orcas and humpbacks....While we were watching the orcas, off in the distance I saw a humpback breach about 3 times, but it was way too far to get a picture. We were kind of on overload with marine mammals to watch at that time. There were also some humpbacks in this area too. Then he took us by a haul out place for stellar sea lions whose numbers are dropping rather drastically and they are frantically trying to find out why. Lots of those guys were up on the beach. There were also some Dall's porpoise on the way back....we saw a couple on our other cruise, but they were too fast to get a picture of...this time there were about 6 of them I think...they love to come up to the boats and surf in the wake or catch the water as it is pushed off the prow. They swim at about 35 mph and look like miniature orcas b/c they have black and white markings as well. In one pix you can see one just under the water and the splash made by the wake they leave behind as they surface. They were really fun to watch.

We finally got back to the boat dock around 7:30 and we opted to walk back to the RV park. We walked along the harbor and saw lots of fish still being cleaned and just enjoyed looking at the boats. Had a snack when we got back and then I got on computer, but no luck loading pictures so I finally gave up and went to bed about 11:30. Planning on sleeping in tomorrow a.m. Good night all....