July 18, 2014 ? Day 59
Whoosh, what another long day, we need to stop this and relax for a minute. Today was our Kenia Fjords Tour. We had to be in Seward by 9:15 AM, so I set the alarm to make sure we were up. No worries, last night was not a night for me to sleep. I am dragging today. Our tour is to take us out to Kenia Fjords National Park, which is mostly made up of water. Capt. Steve was driving today and this is a much bigger boat than the Lula Belle out of Valdez. We sailed out of the harbor with partly cloudy skies but it looked like we could have blue skies later, which it did. Sailing through Resurrection Bay is beautiful, mountains about 3,500 feet rise up from the ocean. Trees cover rocks, we actually passed over the spot where the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate collide. The Pacific Plate goes underneath and pushes up the North American Plate. We see 3 glaciers off to the east and Lowell Point, which is the farthest you can drive in Seward. ?Seward was an important transportation hub for Alaska?s mining, fishing and trapping industries. Resurrection Bay was named in 1792 by a Russian fur trader and explorer Alexander Barnof. While sailing from Kodiak to Yakutat he found unexpected shelter in this bay from a storm and named it Resurrection Bay because it was the Russian Sunday of Easter? (Milepost).
We past Bear Glacier- 3 miles wide and 13 miles long, part of the Harding Icefield and the beginning of the Kenia Fjords National Park. The National Park was ?formed when glaciers flowed down to the sea from the Harding Icefield and then retreated, leaving behind fjords, the deeply carved glacial valleys filled with sea water.? (Milepost) The park is over 600,000 acres, mostly accessible by boat and the Harding Icefield covers 714 square miles. We made our way up to Aialik Glacier where we did see a little calving, it was about 300 feet tall and we were about 1/3 to ? a mile away. But I am sorry to say Columbia Glacier was much better. This was good, don?t get me wrong, just not as big. We also saw Addison and Pederson Glaciers. Aialik is a tidewater glacier, which means it flows into the ocean.
We then headed for Chiswell Islands to check out the Stellar Sea Lions and several different birds. All toll today we saw Stellar Sea Lions, sea otters, Dall?s porpoises, humpback whales, Horned Puffins, Common Murres, Tufted Puffins, Cormorants, Bald Eagle, Harbor seals, Rhinoceros Auklet, Black-Legged Kittiwakes, Mew Gulls and a Mountain goat. One humpback was doing what the Captain called a tail lob, the whale flipped its tail in the air and then over to the side quickly. He whale did this several times in quick succession. Too quick for us to even grab cameras, we have a memory. The Captain also spotted a ?smack of jellyfish?, the water was considerably lighter than surrounding water and the area was filled with jellyfish. First time I had ever heard of that. Not far from this was Barwell Island which was a piece of rock sticking up out of the water several hundred feet with ramparts at the top of it. It was a military station during the World War II. Those deployed there had to be hoisted up with a cable and spend summers with thousands of birds nesting and 60 foot waves crashing against the rock in the winter. Thank you to the men who spent the time in the service out there.
Around 4:45 PM we stopped off at Fox Island for a dinner of salmon, prime rib and crab legs. It was pretty tasty and while we ate a National Park Ranger gave a presentation of the area. We had some time to skip some rocks before the Captain called us aboard again. There was even a person swimming in the water, burrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!! Jim got off some great skips, I suck at it. Back to the harbor and docked about 6:45 PM, time to head for WeBe and start typing.
TTFN