Seward, AK: Kenai Fjords National Park Cruise

Kenai Fjords is a tough National Park to get into.  The entire park is covered by Harding Ice Field so there is no road going through it.  Only one glacier (Exit Glacier) is accessible by road; to see any of the others you need to either take a plane or a boat.  We looked at our options and decided to take the Kenai Fjords cruise – a six-hour tour.  Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale…

When we checked in for the cruise, all passengers were advised that there was rough weather today – 25 knot winds and seven foot seas.  All of us were given the option to postpone our tickets for another day or to get a full refund.  Kevin and I weren’t too concerned – we’d seen those kinds of conditions (albeit unintentionally) back when we lived on our forty-foot sailboat.  We figured the eighty-foot motor vessel would handle it just fine, and so could we.  So we climbed up to the second level of the boat to get seats near a window.  Our seats faced another pair of seats and between us was a table.  A nice elderly couple sat down across from us and we were all joking about enduring the rough weather ahead.  The wife held up her wrist and said, “I’m sure I’ll be fine, I remembered to put on my motion sickness bracelet this morning.”  Yeah…that’s foreshadowing, folks.  Dun-duhn-DUHNNN!

The cruise began on the very calm waters of Resurrection Bay and the crew decided that would be a good time to hand out lunches.  Since it was noon, most people were hungry and everyone chowed down.  (You see where this is going, don’t you?)  About forty-five minutes later the boat steamed out from behind the barrier islands into the churning waters of the Gulf of Alaska, and many passengers desperately regretted eating those Chicken Caesar Salad Wraps.  Including the lady across from us who, without warning, discreetly upchucked all over the table.

Luckily that table was there, otherwise poor Kevin would’ve ended up with a lapful of nastiness.  Nothing landed on us, thank goodness.  The crew were able to clean things up quickly and move the lady to the lower stern deck.  And they finally figured out that it might be a good idea to hand out barf bags.  But the damage was done and from that point on it was pretty much the Vomit Voyage for a good dozen passengers. 

Ten miles later the boat finally rounded Aialik Cape and found calm water once again.  The Holgate Glacier wasn’t nearly as active as the Sawyer glaciers we saw on the Tracy Arm, but the wildlife sightings more than made up for it.  Humpback whales bubble feeding:

Pectoral fin slapping, filtering fish through its baleen, tail flukes

What thrilled me the most was seeing orca swimming in their natural habitat.  No Shamu shows here!  Throughout the course of the day we saw four distinct resident pods of orcas, about thirty whales in all.  The killer whales were difficult to photograph, since they seemed to move a lot faster than the humpbacks.  Unlike at SeaWorld, there was no announcer to tell us to get our cameras ready when they were about to do something cool.  Nine times out of ten, they’d just surface long enough to breathe so all we’d get was a photo of a dorsal fin.  We’d get a little lax with the camera and then it would be the tenth time – when one of the calves breached completely out of the water, or when one of the adults “spy-hopped” us (sticking their head up out of the water for a closer look).  Sadly, all of those amazing things happened when our camera was pointed elsewhere.

Still pretty super to see them in the wild, if you ask me!