Heading south to Petersburg....

Saturday, June 5


I am sitting now in the Petersburg Public Library, the local wireless access. This is our first day of cool, steady rain, and the sun is already breaking through the clouds.  We have truly been blessed with beautiful weather.

We left Juneau a week ago, and headed south through Stephens Passage and Frederick Sound.  Except for crew, all the passengers aboard were women, and we had a blast sharing new wilderness experiences together.  Randy was very busy with much mechanical work, but he found time to go on a couple of paddling and shore excursions with us.  It was a landscape entirely different than the high alpine peaks and barren ice fiords of Glacier Bay... We paddled with curious harbor seals in green fiords hemmed with sitka spruce; skiffed to the tilled moraine outwash of a grounded glacier and hiked on the glacier ice creeping down from the mountains; oohed and aahed at the cute seal pups lounging on turquoise blue icebergs floating out from the calving Dawes Glacier; kayaked past black bears browsing on sedges in a quiet cove, and saw WHALES!

Near Brothers Islands, the currents from Stephens Passage, Frederick Sound and Chatham Strait all converge, providing a rich feeding ground for the large mammmals.  We spent two days in that part of the Inside Passage, and saw many, many humpback whales feeding, including the awesome spectacle of tail slamming and pec fin slapping.  Wow!  Randy took us out in the skiff, and we drifted (at a safe distance) among a family of four whales as they cruised the passage.  Here are just two of the hundreds of whale photos everyone took:

Stopping in the rainforest, on the way to a gorgeous waterfall:

Fellow passengers:

Other wildlife:

At Dawes Glacier:

On Baird Glacier:

Anchorages: