Days in Alaska in May are long, even in southeast. All those hours of light leave you wanting to seize each hour you are given. With that in mind we didn’t waste too much time before we were up and ready to explore, and headed out on a hike. There are definitely places with worse plants (I’m talking about you, southwest Oregon, and your poison oak), but after being reintroduced to devils club I can say I didn’t miss it one bit.
There was a nice spruce and hemlock forest that was dense enough it made getting around pretty easy.
The tide was out and we enjoyed a walk on the beach seeing what we could see.
Then it was back to the cabin to get geared up for an afternoon fishing and sightseeing expedition. Somewhere along the way I read that you might see as many whales as people. That is just plain false. There were way more whales than people. And remember, this is early in the season, before the ocean productivity picks up and the marine life really gets going. We were jigging for halibut and out of the corner of my eye I noticed a big splash. Not just one, actually, several.
There was a whale in the distance ‘tail-lobbing’. It may be that we don’t know for sure why they do it, but it made sense to me when explained that tail lobbing could have as many meanings as ‘hey!’ in English. Maybe they are excited, trying to corner prey, call in friends, or any number of other things. It was quite a scene.
No luck jigging in spot #1, we moved on. Spot #2 led to some better luck, sort of. I hooked into what felt like the monster halibut. Alas, we’ll never know. It was all I could do to hold onto the pole and I hadn’t made much if any progress before it broke off. But oh was it fun while it lasted.
We also had lots of other wildlife to keep us company. I can not get over the fact that marbled murrelets are pretty much everywhere. They were paired up and pretty much everywhere you looked, ducking under the water before I could get a good shot of them. Apparently it is one of, in not the, densest population on Earth. We also were able to spy a couple puffins. And then there are the sea otters. They were feeding in packs (or is it a romp?).
We interrupted them wrestling and feeding for a quick photo-op. I just can’t seem to get enough of them.
After a hike and a few hours of fishing it was time to call it a day. We retreated to the hot tub to watch the sun set over Icy Strait.
