Location: Point Adolphus and Inian Island, Icy Strait, southeast Alaska.
Comments: We started our 4th scuba diving charter of our 2008 Alaska season off by whale watching off Point Adolphus across from the entrance to Glacier Bay. What gives with that as this trip is supposed to be a dive charter!? Well, the thing is that Point Adolphus is one of the most productive feeding grounds in southeast Alaska and the humpback whale sightings are usually quite awesome. Today was no exception, starting off with a pod of orcas cruising along on the surface 15 miles east of Adolphus and then loads of humpbacks right at the point. There’s actually not much involved in whale watching here from my perspective – all I have to do is idle around for half an hour to allow the whales to get used to us and then shut down the engines and wait for the humpbacks to swim past to see what’s going on! We always seem to get our most spectacular whale sightings when they come to us rather than the other way around.
We got a good warmup dive in at Inian Island and then did a “mystery” (exploration) dive. The exploration dive didn’t work out as well as I had hoped unfortunately and got a big “X” for future reference on my charts. I’ve been batting 75% on mystery dives this year so hopefully our guests will allow me to try one more on this trip. The only thing I can say about the exploratory dive was that it had lots of really nice sand. Yikes.
–Captain Mike
Weather: Overcast and raining. Calm in the morning but windy by late afternoon. Rippled seas in our anchorage with bigger stuff outside. Air temperatures in the mid 50’s (this is supposed to be July with temps in the 70’s!!).
Water: Water temperature 45°F, visibility 20 feet.
