25 June

With an early pickup to arrive at the boat piers for an 8 o’clock departure, we were off on a 6 hour cruise.  (You can hum Gilligan’s Island theme song if you want.)  We took a Kenai Fjords National Parks commercial cruise through Resurrection Bay and around the Aialik Peninsula to Holgate Glacier, which is on the eastern side of Harris Peninsula.  Both these peninsulas are at the base of the Harris Icefield. 

We saw lots of wildlife.  Humpback whales, horned and tufted puffins, sea otters, bald eagles, a variety of sea gulls, common murre, Steller sea lions (not to be confused with their more populous cousins California sea lions), harbor seals, Dall dolphins and mountain goats.  Unfortunately we don’t carry a camera that requires more than a pointing and shooting, so there aren’t pictures other than the two distant humpback whales.  You’ll just have to trust me when I say we saw them, without photographic verification.

The above 2 pictures are of glaciers from the Harris Icefield.  At one time they were connects.  The one is now landlocked. The ocean glacier is Holgard Glacier.  It's about 1/4 mile wide, and the boat was about 1/4 mile away.  It was doing some minor calving.  The picture below is glacial ice.  Glacial ice is crystal clear because it is formed from meltwater that has no trapped air or bubbles.

 When we got back, it was and is raining.  Seward is considered part of the North Pacific Rainforest region.  It is chilly, 54 degrees, so Roger and I were bundled up because our blood has thinned AND we’re unaccustomed to wet stuff falling from the sky.  Roger did find a large black spruce tree that was more or less dry underneath it, despite the ground out in the open being very wet.  It just shows how efficient the little spruce needles are at capturing rain water and providing water to the tree and not the undergrowth.

Right now we’re reading up on what we’re going to be doing once we leave Seward.  The destination is Homer, but there could be some stops along the way if we (Roger) finds something interesting.  Homer is on the western side of the Kenai Peninsula.   Homer is 173 road miles from Seward and probably 75 as the crow flies.