Wednesday, June 08, 2016 Boat ride to Columbia Glacier,
Valdez, AK
Today turned out to be a glorious day weather wise. Temperature was going to be in the 60’s and
sunny all day. The water was very calm
as we ventured out from Port Valdez to Prince William Sound to Columbia Bay. This was a hundred mile boat ride. We weren’t even out of the Port when we
spotted a humpback whale and then some sea otters. We hoped that this was how the whole trip was
going to be. As we made our turn into
Columbia Bay we started to see some pieces of ice. As we went further into the bay the icebergs
got bigger and more plentiful. We saw an
eagle sitting on top of a good sized iceberg completely calm as we went
by. As we got closer to the glacier the
air got colder. The glacier was
massive. Columbia Glacier is the last of
the tidewater glaciers to retreat. Since
1980 it has retreated back by 12 miles.
We got within 3 miles of the glacier which was pretty close. Alaska has 30,000 square miles of glacier
ice. We were also told that an iceberg
has only 10% of its ice and snow on top of the water. The rest is below. On the way back we saw 2 more humpback
whales, had a couple of Dall’s porpoises swimming in front of us. We also saw harbor seals and Stellar Sea
Lions. Here is the rest of the wildlife
that we saw Cormorants, Horned Puffins, Black Legged Kittiwakes and Marbled
Murrelets. This was indeed a fantastic
day. We saw more than we thought we
would.
As I stated yesterday we would probably start running into
people we met over and ever this trip and sure enough we ran into George and
Nancy Finlayson on waiting for the cruise. They are from Connecticut and have
been fulltiming for a couple of years. Nice couple and we enjoyed their
companionship during the cruise.
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