Airship Goes to Alaska
We left Warm Springs Bay this morning around 8am and I made breakfast underway: a bed of wilted spinach, fresh Dungeness crab, an over easy egg, topped with hollandaise sauce and chives. As I was putting stuff on the table for Christy and Mijonet and Kevin was at the helm on a business call, all of a sudden out the dinette window appeared a giant whale tail…diving…pretty much under the boat. I gasped in shock and Christy knew from my face to look behind her so she got to see it too, but Mij missed it. It was insane (and huge, and too close too close too close). Kevin missed it completely.
No big deal. Just boating along eating fresh crab and eggs with hollandaise and a GIANT WHALE TAIL RIGHT THERE!!!
We got further across Chatham Strait and the seas were about 2-3 feet and a little choppy, so we tacked a bit toward Kake before heading back on course toward Pybus Bay on Admiralty Island. We got ourselves into a GIANT pod (or MANY giant pods) of humpbacks. We’ve never seen so many humpbacks. Not even on that one cruise up Stephens Passage, or that one other time with Tiffani and Deke when we left Kake headed toward Baranof. We saw EIGHTEEN humpback breaches today. EIGHTEEN! (I only got one photo, because, well…it’s a bit of a surprise when it happens!) Okay, I’ll shut up. Here are photos. (For some of these photos, picture me on the bow, with my camera, looking back at Kevin saying “Too close too close too close!” It was hard to figure out which way to go NOT to be too close. They were everywhere. None of the photos (not even all of these photos together) can even come close to describing how it was to be surrounded for miles by humpback spouts, breaches, tails…the SOUND of them all around us was CRAZY. Spectacular.
Oh yeah, photos:
Oops, almost! I got a nice sharp shot of the splash though:
I took a few photos of this boat that was hanging out watching the whales near us. In every photo the guy on the flybridge with his long lens was not looking at the whales diving so close between his boat and ours, and any other time I’d think this was a funny shot, but trust me, he was not missing a thing:
These two surprised us and slid right past the boat as we quietly watched in awe (and felt the spray on our skin as they passed):
We are in Sheldon Cove now, a little cove in Donkey Bay in Pybus Bay on Admiralty Island. We’ve got two crab traps in the water and we’re looking for bears. The kayak is out, and everyone is having a blast.
