Le Voyage continues

Gaining perspective

Good night's sleep. Should be after going to bed at the equivalent of 2 in the morning, though we're three hours behind that, local time. We lie about, looking at the activities for the day in the ship's newsletter and making some plans, then we dress and head for breakfast.

We'd gone to Maine a few years back during a September, and a cruise ship docked at Bar Harbor while we were there. At the time I remarked that I had never seen so many old people in my life. That's pretty much true for this trip -- populated with old people (which I realize includes us). We do see some couples with kids, though my guess would be grandparents taking the kids on a big adventure (though why they do that during the school year, I can't fathom.) The younger adults on board either are sans children or traveling with preschool age children. Even with their presence on board, I'd put the average age in the 60s.

We follow our leisurely breakfast with attendance at a lecture from a naturalist, Sandra Schemp, a retired professor from NewYork, hired by the cruise line to enhance our experience. She clues us in as to the wildlife we might see see and when she'll be available to help us spot the critters. Among the things she says is that she likes to say you can't sit and watch the water for an hour without seeing something. Sure enough, while I'm writing this, Sharon spots blows in the water outside our window. We can't ID what we're looking at, but I count it as a prediction confirmed.

Later we attend a second lecture and catch Schemp afterward. She's excited to hear we saw something, and after asking a few questions says we probably saw humpbacks (insert your own Star Trek joke here.) Her questions make it possible for us to ID the next bunch of animals to flash past us as Dall's porpoises. They hang around long enough for us to theoretically get pictures, but we have a hard time finding them in our viewfinders and focusing. I point my camera in the general direction and hit the shutter. Later we'll find out that the tactic worked. I'm not zoomed all the way out, but in the bottom of the frame, you can see four spots. Blown up sufficiently you can tell that they're fins.

The big event of the day is sailing into Yakutat Bay to view the Hubbard Glacier. Off our balcony we can see enormous mountains rising through the mist and clouds. I read in something we have that this area is home to many of Alaska's tallest mountains. We won't see Denali while we're here, but these mountains are plenty impressive.

High mountain peaks along the coast of Alaska as
we enter Yakutat Bay.

We spot the glacier some distance away, which leads me to the ludicrous thought, "That's it?" I've no sense of distance, but I'm guessing that we're seeing the big ice river 20 or 30 miles away, the distance we were able to see mountains in Scotland from the coast of Ireland. Schemp told us it's the longest tidewater glacier in North America, and from where we are, you can see that it stretches quite a distance. Actually, it stretches 72 miles, and the face will stand some 350 feet above the waterline.

But the distance throws off my perspective. The glacier doesn't look that tall or that long, not that you can see the whole length. Of course it grows as we near, but at one point we decide we're too cold standing around watching as we near and need to go in for a bit, and we'll just see what it looks like when we're close to being at our arrival spot.

The face of Hubbard Glacier as it enters Disenchanted Bay.
Our naturalist says it's six miles wide, and the dark stripe
in the middle was caused by two glaciers meeting
to form the Hubbard.

We wander about the gift shop for a bit and pick up a companion for my Maine moose -- a stuffed animal I have previously enthused about as being "the cutest thing" -- then head back for the promenade deck. As soon as I can see through the glass doors, I turn to Sharon, telling her to "come see this!" Ice chunks float everywhere. Big ones, little ones. Not Titanic sized ones, but big enough, I'm guessing. Some are surely as big or bigger than some of the fishing boats we've seen.

Then we walk outside and see how close we've come to the glacier. It towers above our ship, all it's features suddenly visible. We are both suitably awed.


The captain will bring the ship very close, though how close I've no idea, especially now I've learned my lesson about perspective. But ridiculously close. He'll hold position for a while before turning the ship back and forth so people in the balcony rooms on both sides of the ship can view the glacier from their rooms. We're on the bow end of the promenade deck most of the time, watching and listening to the cracking and booming sounds the glacier makes.

Chunks of ice flow out  from a recent calving, or breaking off
of a part of the glacial face.

Sharon sees the first ice calve off the face. And she'll see several more. Takes me a bit to see anything more than the splashes that mark the aftermath, but I eventually see a chunk break off that's large even I can't miss it and watch it plunge into the water. Neither of us actually manages to get a picture of one of these calvings, though. We spend an hour, hour and a half or so before the ship heads back out of the bay. Remember "ditto" from the first post? Well, "ditto."


We've been on the water for less than two days. Long range forecasts indicate we may be in for some rain, but we decide what we've seen so far has made the trip, even if the rest is a wash.

A portion of the Hubbard Glacier a bit closer up.