Another typical Alaska day, gray skies, but smooth water, as we sailed in the last part of Frederick Sound, toward our morning destination: the bay of Le Conte Glacier, on the mainland of Alaska. Miles before we even approached the entrance to the bay we could see big pieces of bluish ice floating near the land. Very near the terminal moraine of this glacier, deposited there in times past when it reached the open ocean, we anchored, as nearer to this enormous barrier of rocks and sand and silt the water is very shallow. So we readied our expedition landing craft and motored our way towards the bay proper, where an enormous amount of growlers, bergy-bits, and icebergs awaited our scrutiny! Different birds were seen resting on some of the pieces of ice, but we sailed on, towards the BIG pieces. Almost all of them were a magnificent baby blue in color, with very different constitutions.
Fantastically beautiful, almost incredible…and we saw a good number of harbor seals swimming around the area of these chunks of ice, such curious and shy animals!
Eventually we all reconvened back on the ship, had lunch, and during this time we had a nutritious lunch. Then we tied up at the dock in Petersburg, and began oh, so many different activities here.
Some of us walked into the small town to see the typical Norwegian flavor it has; others walked along the dock and were shown all the different types of fishing boats, from big purchasers to small trollers and medium-sized trawlers. Even some of us were taken across the Wrangel Narrows to the island of Kupreanof, where we had a nice walk into a very interesting bog, also called muskeg. Here many plants typical of the bog environment let us understand how they are able to live in so acidic an environment, especially the sundews, who capture very small insects to digest them down to amino acids and then to the nitrogen, which all plants need for their growth.
And some of us even took small floatplane flights, over the Stikine Ice Field or the Le Conte glacier, a fantastic view of a glacier, running down from its origin to the sea.
Back on board, we had our Recap, and then a marvelous Dungeness crab feast, the most marvelous of all the crabs!
