Sailing through Frederick Sound caught us this morning. A cool, windy morning, with calm waters. Up early, some of us saw a shark swimming by, and shortly later, a sleeping harbor porpoise! Yes, they must sleep, like every single mammal. A few birds graced the waters, floating by, and here and there flying gulls. Soon we were in the proximity of our morning’s adventure: at the entrance of Le Conte fjord, full of giant icebergs, in perfect transparency, and even in blue. All the forms were seen, as we enjoyed traveling around them in our expedition landing craft, well wrapped against the cold. This all after a good hearty breakfast. Cameras worked overtime, batteries became exhausted. And soon we were back on our mother ship, National Geographic Sea Bird, and again off to a new and quite different adventure: Petersburg.
This lovely little city was founded in the late 1800’s by a Norwegian where he found the fish, the ice, and the wood to make the crates for sending all these salmon and other species to Seattle. And today it is a working town, not a tourist trap. Here we arrived in the early afternoon, and promptly set to our very varied activities: hiking in the bogs or muskegs, walking along the interesting docks to see the different types of fishing boats, taking floatplane flights up to the glacier, cycling into and around town, or simply walking into this lovely community and seeing “downtown’s” two important streets!
At the bog, which is on Kupreanof Island (Petersburg is on Mitkof Isand), we saw the very different vegetation, adapted to living in acid water, such as shore pines, Alaska yellow cedar, common juniper, and many small plants, especially the sundews, hungry little carnivorous plants, which obtain their necessary aminoacids by decomposing small gnats and flies.
After all these adventures, we all gathered again on our ship, and slowly set off into Frederick Sound again, and northwest, to our next adventure of our expedition, Tracy Arm, after an interesting Recap and dinner.
