Tracy Arm and more glaciers

Leslie Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Today we spent over 11 hours aboard the Captain Cook.

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We were taking a trip to Tracy Arm glacier area. It takes more than 2 hours to reach the glacier, so the trip was really long. Luckily, we boarded first and captured the best seats. We had seats at a table in the front of the boat. Our friends Michelle and Bob from Yakama, Washington, arrived at bit late but were able to sit with us at the sole table aboard. We had a great time chatting with Michelle and Bob; afterwards Robert and I discussed that we would have been bored on the trip if we hadn’t spent the time with these new friends.

On the trip to Tracy Arm we were lucky to see a black bear on the beach. After they come out of hibernation, black bear desire certain vegetation as an essential part of their diet. They find this vegetation along the beach. This bear seemed very curious about our noisy boat.

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Most impressive of the day were sights of ice-burgs. The blue color is so unusual. The blue is caused because the ice is so dense. As the ice melts and more air is introduced, the ice appears more white in color. By the way, it was quite chilly at the ice-burgs. I had on cotton long sleeve shirt, light fleece sweater, wind-proof fleece jacket, Goretex jacket, fleece hat and gloves. It rained on and off throughout the day. Sometimes it rained so hard that we were all worried about taking our camera equipment out on the deck to take pictures. Two men tried using umbrellas to protect their cameras but I think that was less than successful.

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We saw some seals near the glaciers. The seals give birth on the ice floats. There were several mom and pup combinations but the best picture I got is of this seal who seems to be performing for us.

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We were taken to two different glaciers. You’ll notice that there appear to be more ice burgs near one of the glaciers than the other. That isn’t due to warmer water, rather the fact that there is a strong underwater current near the glacier without the ice burgs. Most of the ice blocks that have fallen from that glacier have floated away.

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And although this wasn’t a whale watching trip, we saw several whales:

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Since we got back after 6:30 pm we had decided to go out to dinner. We had been told about a Thai place near our campground. We’re located about 10 miles from downtown and close to the University of Alaska, Southeast. The Thai place was packed, with a long line of people waiting. Since that is generally a good sign, we decided to wait. The food portions were huge; the food was good, but we ordered way too much. We’ll have at least one more meal from the leftovers. We didn’t get back home until after 9:30 but it was still light outside.