4:00am came way too early this Tuesday morning. With at best 6 hours of sleep, it was time to get ready to depart for Seward Alaska. Google Maps said it was a two-hour drive. We had to be at the dock by 7:45 and we planned to be driving by 5:00am. We had IDed a food truck in Seward called “The Porthole“. But we really didn’t expect construction delays that had the roads down to one late at three different spots. One, near Seward was nearly a 20 minute wait to go. We were going to be a bit late.
We also forgot the Dramamine. Sherry was also concerned about a heavy breakfast before going out to sea, so we chose to stop by SafeWay, a grocery chain to pick up the motion sickness med, and grab something light at the grocery. We ended up at the dock right on time.
The weather was supposed to be rain all day, but skies, while eerie looked hopeful. The seas were supposed to be quite calm. Instead of a larger “party boat” from some of the bigger carriers in the area, we booked with a service than runs a smaller, 6-passenger fleet of boats, driven by a single captain/guide. The service was Seward Ocean Excursions and we were matched up with Captain Calley. Sadly, two of the people expected to join us had gotten a later start and was stuck in the traffic, so we took off after waiting with just four passengers.
The 6-hour cruise takes you out of Seward through Resurrection Bay south and around the horn into Aialik Bay and north to Holgate Glacier. Along the way, we also got to see the Aialik Glacier at a distance. There was plenty of unique landscape formations that are common in the Kenai Fjords National Park.
We had a chance to see both humpback whales and orcas, sea lions and seals, sea otters, eagles, puffins, dahli porpoises, and more. We pretty much saw all of that, but in most cases, they were too far away to photograph and were not interested in coming along to play with our boat. Humpbacks were no where to be found, but we found a pod of orcas at the end. We found a gray whale, well the remains of an expired one.
The star of the show was Holgate Glacier. While there we found an eagle perched upon the top of a spike of ice. We used a fishing net to snag some glacial ice out of the water. It was a highlight for Sherry to hold a part of a glacier in her hand. While Sherry was photographing me holding some ice, a roar of thunder came from the direction of the glacier. She panned around and caught several frames of ice shearing off, known as calving.
Given the predicted weather, we had about five minutes of rain on the way back to port.
As mentioned above, the seas were quite calm except in an area where the two bays and the Pacific Ocean merge. That confluence of water running different directions made for some good chop. It was in this area that the sea lions and seals showed up in abundance. Just as we were ready to head back, the call came over the radio that a pod of Orcas had been spotted. We changed course to go help find them and we saw their dorsal fins pop up periodically at a distance, but our time was up, so it was back to port.
For lunch we basically had to go about a block away from the parking lot to find a small, outdoor seating BBQ joint called Firebrand BBQ then it was a two hour drive back to the hotel. We chilled there a bit until dinner, where we drove about 15 minutes north to the city of Kenai and a Mexican place called Playa-Azul. And that was a wrap on Day 4.