Glacier Bay, August 10

Occasional brief glimpses of sun today, but mostly overcast and about 48 degrees at mid-morning. However, since we are in the bay (fjord), we are protected from wind on all sides by the Fairweather Mountains which is the highest coastal range of mountains in the world. We are cruising very slowly, hardly making a ripple. I haven't seen any glaciers calving yet, but there are certainly plenty of glaciers and small floes in the water.

Evidently, if I had been up and out on deck (and on the correct side for once) at 5:00 a.m., there were sightings of a humpback whale then of some wolves on the beach and at least one bear on the mountainside. But then, if I had been out there, probably no one would have seen anything. Of course, it is extremely unlikely for me to be up at that hour.

(Later) For most of the day I stayed in the warmth and comfort of our cabin with the tv turned on to the forward facing ship's camera which was also the channel with the National Park Ranger's commentary on what we were seeing. We were going slow enough that whenever anything of interest came along, I had time to grab my camera and nip out on deck to see it ... at least the stationary stuff like mountains and glaciers. That's another advantage of a cabin near a set of doors out onto a promenade deck over a cabin with a balcony, equal access to either port or starboard. The glacier here is either the Reid Glacier or the Lamplugh Glacier, although I'm pretty sure it is the latter. There were some people from a camp on the beach to one side of the glacier kayaking along the face of it. That's quite dangerous in case the glacier calves because the resulting wave can be tremendous. The Ranger said they recommend that small craft stay at least a quarter of a mile away.

The most photogenic of the several glaciers we visited was the Margerie Glacier that you see here. It is about 250 feet above the water and beween 50 and 100 feet below the water. The largest was the Grand Pacific Glacier right next to the Margerie, however it flows through an area of softer rock so picks up more rocks and dirt and just looks like a huge pile of rocks by the time it reaches the water. Both of these glaciers are up the Tarr Inlet off the main part of Glacier Bay. We sailed very slowly up the inlet to the top where the glaciers are, then the ship turned slowly around in a circle using only its side thrusters. Of course the silly glacier waited to do its calving until I was on the other side of the ship, and that is over so quickly that I couldn't get there. After our allotted time there, we moved slowly away to make room for a Princess ship.

By early evening, we were back out of Glacier Bay and even out of the Inside Passage. We headed out into the open ocean of the Gulf of Alaska en route to Seward. Tomorrow will be spent at sea which should provide the first and only motion that will feel like we are on a ship since the whole point of the Inside Passage is that those waters are protected and calm. The Captain says it should be a pretty smooth crossing to Seward with only 6 or 7 foot swells. We'll see.