Tracy Arm Tour

Robert, Tuesday, June 24

Today we took the Tracy Arm Glacier tour. We got on the boat at 8:30 a.m. and were soon underway. The trip to the glacier was a little more than two hours each way. Getting there we saw a number of hump back whales. They rise to the surface, blow, and then dive. They repeat this about every 30 seconds. Sometimes they flip their tail in the air and when that happens it normally means they are sounding and won’t be back at the surface for 30 minutes. They are impressive. If the boat goes very slow, it is often possible to get within 50 feet of them. One even came to blow within 10 feet of the boat! Tracy Arm is a fjord with two glaciers at the upper end. The walls of the fjord are very steep and rise something like 4,000 feet; sometimes in near vertical walls of rock. We did see a black bear on the shore on the way up the fjord. We saw both glaciers and were hoping to see calving where large pieces of ice break off and fall into the water but no luck. I think the most impressive thing about the glaciers is the blue color of the ice. All along the fjord there were waterfalls. Some were mere trickles of water and some were large gushes. We were on the trip with the couple we met and for the periods when we were just motoring along, it was good to have someone to talk with. They are both retired and live in Yakima, Washington. I suspect we will stay in contact with them as they are interesting and they are on a similar tour to ours. When we got back, we decided to get dinner at a restaurant. While Juneau has a lot of tourist shops, there aren’t many restaurants. We finally located a Thai restaurant that was quite good. The portions were so large that we will have at least one more meal from the leftovers. I think spending all day on a boat is very tiring as I went to sleep in one of the recliners almost as soon as we got to the trailer. I did get up at 5:30 a.m. and we got back to the trailer around 9:00 p.m. We did decide that the whales were so interesting that we would go on a whale watching boat while we are in Juneau. While we have been on boats whale watching in the past, the whales seem more numerous here than we have seen before.