Humpbacks at Point Adolphus, Alaska

Our second day at Glacier Bay - whale watching at Point Adolphus, near Gustavus.

The skipper was a small, seemingly laconic guy with a sailor’s roll and cold weather mustache. He wore a cap, foul weather gear and a pair of the ubiquitous brown rubber boots everyone seems to wear in Alaska. All he was missing was a pipe. He welcomed us aboard the Taz in a quiet manner, got us underway, and then gave a short safety lecture, which basically consisted of telling us “if you go in the water, we’ll throw a life ring, but you’ll have to swim around for a minute or two while we turn the boat around to come get you. Water’s about 44F, so it’ll wake y’ up a bit.”

Whales surfacing near small fishing boats

He spent most of the time at the helm, looking for whales, and getting us into a good viewing position when he found some. His offsider was a young woman from Mississippi with the clear skin and impossibly white teeth of her generation. She loved the work, and was planning to come back next summer, and enthusiastically passed on all she learnt this year.  She or the skipper would hang off the outside of the rail, standing on the unguarded outer deck walk, to chat to guests, totally unconcerned about the heaving water or the gusting wind. There were about sixteen board, all Americans except for us two Aussies.

Humpback whale diving

Lucky to see Orcas from our boat - a male and female here

The fog was heavy, and it didn’t look promising out there. We crept through the gloom as it gradually lifted and sank, wrapping islands in drifts of long white fingers of cloud, only a few feet above the water. We found whales, lots of them, some individually, some in groups of two or three, huffing and curving out of the water several times before disappearing with an elegantly raised tail, diving deep to scare up herring and stir up the krill. These are humpbacks, mainly females about to return to Hawaii with the calves they gave birth to in warmer waters the previous winter. Unfortunately it was the wrong time of year to see any of them breach, that impossible leap only a forty ton whale can do. The jury’s out on why they do it – but I reckon it’s for sheer joy myself.

Fishermen were out in droves in small chartered fishing dinghies with two or three people aboard. They seemed to be catching plenty of fish, judging by the number of bent rods, and we saw at least one huge halibut brought in. They loomed in and out of the fog, sometimes dwarfed by a huge back surfacing between us and them and spouting vapour into the air.

We stopped at Gustavus for lunch, at the only café for a few hundred miles. It was full of heavily bearded locals in the same rubber boots, and a bustling busy woman who served two things – homemade pizza and chowder. The chowder was amazing – clams, halibut and smoked salmon in cheddar soup, essentially. I decided not to think about the kilojoule possibilities. Anyway, cold weather means a lot of extra energy is required. Doesn’t it?

A walk in the forest with a ranger that afternoon ended our time at Glacier Bay. Sitka spruce and western hemlock dominate the forest there, with understories of alder, blueberries and other plants such as deadly baneweed and devil’s club, and storybook toadstools, with a covering of moss and lichen over most of the scenery. At the western end of the bay, where the Lodge sits, recovery from the glacial retreat during the last 175 years is well underway, but closer to the glaciers the hills are still quite bare with only early regrowth struggling up the slopes. It’s all beautiful and
 exotic to people used to crunchy, messy eucalypt woodlands. And you don’t get moose footprints around our creeks either.

Dropping off bear food kayakers in Glacier Bay

We could have happily spent much longer here, exploring all of the glacier inlets and going ashore in other places. During the glacier visit yesterday we picked up three kayakers from a really remote spot, and dropped several more off even further out. It’s sobering to see them lining up their gear, with all the food packed into sealed black plastic cylinders too tough and too big for the bears to bite into. The cylinders have to be hung up in a tree (when you can find one) well away from the camp in case bears are attracted. We were told they can smell a human from nine miles away, and what they had for breakfast yesterday. (I don’t reckon that’s such a feat – I know some people who fart a lot too) I don’t mind admitting that bears scare me, and I was quite happy to stay on the boat, although the mountain goats looked very cute, a thousand feet up the mountain as they were, bear-proofing themselves. There are wolves here as well, but we didn’t see any. Lots of birds – mainly waterbirds, such as guillemots, cormorants, common murres (which can swim down to 600 feet!!), murelets, phalaropes, black scoters and various gulls. Most exciting to see puffins! The tufted puffin to be precise, a very shy bird, but we got close enough to several to get a good look at them. Rhinoceros auklets were another unusual species, and we saw a lot of them. Plenty of bald eagles in evidence too - what wonderful birds they are.

The Park interpretation was good – a park naturalist travelled with us, explaining what we were seeing and the history behind it all. Most of the glaciers are retreating at an alarming rate. They make a lot of noise, muffled explosions, and cracking and banging and every so often a large lump crashes into the water in a flurry of shattered ice. We didn’t see any large calving happen, but there was a lot of small erosion going on. It was very, very cold. Even with several layers on, standing on the deck of the boat while it was moving was not for the faint hearted. And this is summer, so I can barely imagine what it must be like in the depths of winter.

The photo here of a Puffin is a little blurred but they're very shy and don't make it easy. Probably doesn't help lumbering up to them in a large boat, either. But it was so exciting to see real ones! It's a bird watcher's paradise here.