Alaskan Cruise, Days 10 and 11 – At Sea

If a cruise is going to suck, it will probably suck on the days you’re at sea. You paid to visit fascinating places by ship. When you’re not at the fascinating places, you’ve just got ship. I grant that it’s a marvelous ship, with liquor near the hot tubs and pizza a short walk from the string quartet. But in the end it’s a hotel full of strangers you can’t get away from. The cruise line tacitly admits this by packing each day with entertainment and educational opportunities. But at some point you’ll want to choke the hillbilly at the next dining table to death with his own beard, and no number of cha-cha lessons will change that.

However, the ocean offshore of Alaska is more fun than any of the places you might visit on shore. The ship has a guy whose job is to look around for cool things, such as a sea lion climbing the face of a glacier (just as an example). Then he tells everyone to look off the port bow for this amazing thing. After half a dozen people are trampled to death while everyone tries to figure out where the port bow is, people pack the railing four deep to collectively snap a quarter of a million photos of one perplexed sea lion.

It’s great.

Rather than babble about how great it is, I’ll include a few of the 5,000 photos I’ve taken over the past couple of days.

To start with, here’s a glacier. Yes, I know it’s just another wall of ice, but I think the picture is pretty.

Glacier In The Mist

I’ll follow that with a couple of humpback whale shots, one jumping around like a dachshund, and two more just hanging out, wondering where to go for dinner.

Whale Jumping

Two Whales

I happened to catch a glacier calving, which means a hunk of it is falling off. Look for the red circle on the first shot—that indicates the hunk that falls off.

Calving Frames 1

Calving Frames 2

And I’ll finish with a traditional farewell whale shot.

Whale Butt

Tomorrow—puppies!

Alaskan Cruise, Day 5 – Juneau

My wife and I resumed our prophylactic anti-heart-attack walking regime at 7:00 a.m. Alaska Time, a lazy three hours after sunrise. A gale hurled drizzle across the Celestial deck. It would probably have destroyed our roof back home, but we didn’t care. We had cocooned ourselves in the shirts and sweaters we’d bought in Ketchikan, and we looked like two rolls of toilet paper with legs power-walking around the railing.

During breakfast I bounced in my chair like a chained terrier because today’s main activity would be a whale watching tour. Mid-morning we skipped away from the cruise ship and down the pier through a freshening rainstorm and thickening fog, and half an hour later we boarded a high-speed catamaran. The crew welcomed us and smiled, but they shuffled their feet while warning that we might not see anything in this weather. After all, you can’t just summon a while like you would a pizza.

An hour later we ran across this fellow:

The consensus among the tour guides was that this guy was just dinking around having a good time.
The consensus among the tour guides was that this guy was just dinking around having a good time.

He was soon joined by his five buddies in the killer whale pod:

There were two more killer whales swimming around with these, but never once did all six of the inconsiderate bastards all stay on the surface for the 10 seconds I would have needed to get them in focus.
There were two more killer whales swimming around with these, but never once did all six of the inconsiderate bastards stay on the surface for the 10 seconds I would have needed to get them in focus.

An hour after that a humpback whale dropped by to visit:

Sixty seconds later he crushed that boat like he was Moby Dick. Well, he probably thought hard about it.
Sixty seconds later he crushed that boat like he was Moby Dick. Well, he probably thought hard about it.

Finally, we ran across these sea lions draped all over a buoy like cheap glass angels on a Christmas tree.

I felt exactly the same way after the Chocolate Buffet.
I felt exactly the same way after the Chocolate Buffet.

It was a pretty cool afternoon. On the bus ride back to the ship we passed the gauntlet of Juneau’s watch and jewelry stores. We also saw an alpaca products store that we promised to visit another day. When we drove right past a “Fudge for Sale” sign, our entire bodies convulsed at being unable to stop the bus.

We finished this evening in the ship’s Italian restaurant. There the maitre d’ managed to clean, gut, skin and bone a striped bass right beside our table and make it not only appetizing but artistic.

Today we were victorious.