AK23 – Day 10 – Seward – Traveling Light

Noon Report:

Location: N 60° 07.07′, W 149° 25.60′
Speed: Docked
Course: Docked
Weather: Partly Cloudy
Temperature: 11º C; 53º F
Wind: S 21 knots; 24 mph

Resonably late excursion today so we had time to exercise, but not enough time to eat at Mamsens. Tomorrow will be our final breakfast on this cruise so we’ll be sure to eat there then.

The sun was peaking between the clouds and the mountains this morning.

The other interesting feature of this morning was a major plumbing blockage for the back half of the ship. It is not unheard of for someone to flush something they shouldn’t that results in blocking a group of cabins. But something this widespread is something else again. Fortunately we found public facilities forward in the ship so we could ‘take care of business’ before our excursion.

WE presented ourselves at 9:15 and boarded one of 4 busses carrying people on our excursion – a wildlife cruise on Resurrection Bay. The bus trip was all of 10 minutes (around to the other side of the dock) where we all boarded a wildlife hunting boat.

After the orientation and introductions and such we were on our way – only to stop fairly quickly to observe a pair of sea otters playing in the middle of the bay. While we were watching the staff naturalist talked about their physiology, behaviors, and environment.

Once the otters moved on we did too. From that point we headed almost directly out of the bay and into the Gulf of Alaska.

Along the way the captain talked about formations, glaciers, and such.

The reason we moved quickly into the gulf became clear about 15 minutes later when the buzz around the boat started. Someone had seen a fin off in the distance.

The captain revealed that she had received information of Orca activity in this area. We followed international law and best practice and stopped about 100 yards away from the pod (There were actually 2 pods in the area.) and spend as much time as we could observing them.

After initial shots from inside I went out to the front deck for some better views.

While we couldn’t approach closer than 100 yards, there was nothing to stop them from coming closer to us. In those cases we shut down our engines and let them ‘do as they will’. Fortunately they hadn’t learned the trick of attacking our rudder.