Location: Point Adolphus (across from Glacier Bay) and Inian Island, Icy Strait, southeast Alaska.
Comments: Our poor guests. I think I gave them too many options this morning and left them feeling somewhat frustrated. Started out with some great humpback whale watching off Point Adolphus. The bizarrely behaving solitary young adult that we observed last week frolicking and pretending to be a sea lion is still here. But he was overshadowed by the sheer number of other humpback whales in the area. I ended up stopping the ship’s engines, drifting and watching groups of humpback whales swim past. Saw 1 group of 13 adults swimming together and kept my fingers crossed that they were forming up to start bubblenet feeding. No such luck unfortunately although the group did multiple course changes and chose to swim very close to the Nautilus Explorer on occasion. It was fantastic to see them chose to swim by incredibly closely. Eagles and Stellar sea lions were everywhere. AJ skunked me once again and was first to spot 2 grizzly (coastal brown) bears on the beach. So I positioned the Nautilus Explorer close in to the beach to get a good view of the brownies. Our poor guests – some folks were on the port side of the ship watching the bears (which got especially interesting when the grizzlies spotted something further down the beach and got up on their hind legs to get a better view) while other guests were on the starboard side watching the fantastic humpback whale action. And some poor guests were running back and forth to both sides of the boat trying to watch everything at once!! I’ll do better next time and try to organize things so that our wildlife viewings are more spaced out.
–Captain Mike
Weather: Overcast, light winds, flat calms seas, air temperatures in the mid 50’s
Water: Water temperature 45 – 46°F, great visibility 30 – 40 feet dive #1, lower vis dive #2, great vis down deeper
