It’s about 20 miles or so (each way) to cruise to Le Conte Glacier from Petersburg (depending on how far you go into Le Conte Bay…we went pretty far in!) We left Petersburg around 7am this morning on what turned out to be another beautiful day.
Approaching Le Conte Bay:
We watched a large piece of this iceberg break off and fall into the water, and then watched the rest of it tip. See where the water line was?
We wove our way cautiously through the bits of floating ice, being careful not to disturb the harbor seals and their pups floating on MANY of the icebergs as we got closer to the glacier. It’s a rare and incredible thing to be able to take yourself by boat to a tidewater glacier like this, and we all felt the beauty of it. We took tons of photos, so I’ll just let those do most of the talking.
All those dark marks on the bergie bits in front of the glacier? Seals and seal pups:
Kevin took the drone up twice from the boat while we were near the glacier, but there are too many of those photos to include in this same post, which is already mostly photos, so I’ll do a second post with just the aerials.
The low clouds cleared up as we were leaving Le Conte Bay and we decided to do a little fishing.
Waterfall with iceberg:
Kevin was out in the cockpit fishing (had already caught one too-small King) when directly in front of us: a very large humpback whale. Shirley got a perfect closeup view! Alaska’s really delivering today!
After the whale dove, a minute or two later I felt a little “bump” on the boat. I yelled out to Kevin (he was on the top deck) to see if he felt it, and he said “it was just me sitting down here on the freezer.” I said “Do it again.” He did, and that was not what I felt before at all. The thing I felt…I felt in my feet, and it was “whole boat” … I looked down finally at the sonar and saw this image. That is our SideVu sonar. The center line is the boat, and the blue on either side is the bottom, as seen from either side of the hull. So that bump I felt, was likely a little tap from the whale (which if you’ll notice by the 100, as in “100 feet deep”…is pretty LARGE).
Fun stuff! (It was not scary at all, really…just FYI)
We fished a bit more, saw one more humpback (a bit further away), caught a couple other fish (one flounder and one cod, that we didn’t know was a cod or we probably would have kept it, but now we know)…and just generally had a great day overall.
Next up: drone photos in Le Conte Bay!
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