Eerily Beautiful Glacier Bay

Sea days are usually a slow start. During the course of the cruise we discovered that you could get tea/coffee delivered to your room first thing in the morning with breakfast if you wanted it. On sea days we would get our drinks delivered a little later than on port days so we could get that extra few minutes of sleeping in.  Today you could feel the excitement in the air as the would be an exciting day of scenery.  At least that was the theme until we turned on the forward camera and saw that it was absolutely pouring with rain. 

Some time after breakfast, mum and I made our way out to the observation lounge on deck 11 to see if we could get a good spot by the windows. Unfortunately everyone else had the same idea, so we headed out to the open air observation deck to see if there was somewhere sheltered where we could stand and watch as the glaciers went passed. I lasted about 5 minutes outside before I decided to head back into the lounge to try and find some place to sit and watch. The old seats available were at the bar so I unloaded my stuff and sat down to wait until a seat came free. It wasn;t long before the ship turned around and all the people moved to the other side of the lounge to keep viewing the same glacier. This was my chance to get a closer seat, so I quickly grabbed my stuff and moved to a couple of open seats right in front of the window. It was at this point that mum came back in briefly to dry off and to grab some coffee. 

Early that morning some National Park Rangers had come aboard the ship to held with navigation through the bays. Some of the rangers were located up at the observation deck with a small selection of items to purchase and also to help the guests out with wildlife spotting and other questions that they had. One thing that they helped me out with was at one point I spotted some small black dots out on an ice flow and another black dot swimming towards them. At this point I got out my camera and put the zoom out to maximum to see if I could identify what they were. They looked a little too small for seals and at one point I saw that the one in the water was floating on its back, with is a common trait of Sea Otters. After snapping a few photos I wandered over to the Rangers to see if they could help me identify what they were. Indeed they were some Otters!

It was just after this that mum came back in for thae las time and we headed back to the room to dump our stuff and head back out to get some lunch. After lunch we headed down to the main showroom where there were some talks going on all about the national park. The talk that we wanted to go to was about the Tlinget culture. This talk was quite interesting and we learned a lot. 

Once the Rangers got off the ship later that afternoon, the ship headed down to Ketchikan, via the outside of Baranof Island. The waters on the outside of this island were a little rougher, probably no rougher than crossing the Cook Straight in the middle of winter, however, mum and I are not seasoned sailers so this was a little too much for us. We got the free seasickness medication from the front desk, had some bread and jam for dinner with some ginger ale and stayed in our stateroom for the remainder of the night watching movies.