Little did we expect, waking up a full hour before expedition leader Larry's typical morning update commenced a day with mostly sunny skies and abundant natural history encounters. Captain Shawn Nettles strategically navigated National Geographic Sea Lion into Red Bluff Bay, an intricate waterway bordered by an ultramafic igneous rock thrust from Earth's mantle. The bluff is high in chromium, magnesium, nickel and iron, elements giving this geologic feature its phenomenal color as well as the reason why no vegetation inhabits the immediate area. Upon making our first hairpin turn, we encountered a humpback whale, then two Sitka black-tailed deer, a red-throated loon, numerous eagles, lion's mane jellies and a waterfall cascading from hundreds of feet up the steep bay walls.
After breakfast, while traveling north through Chatham Strait, we found Fred Sharpe of the Alaska Whale Foundation and his summer interns floating in a zodiac surrounded by a group of nine humpback whales cooperative bubble net feeding. This is a feeding behavior predominately found in southeast Alaska. Fred Sharpe recognized many of the whales in the group by their flukes and the sounds of their unique voices they use for frightening fish into prey-balls ready to be swallowed up in their baleen-lined mouths.
Later, after lunch, we made our way deep into Sitkoh Bay, tucking back into shallow nooks and crannies in the style only traveling aboard expedition ships offers. A morning whale watching on the ship begs for the legs to be stretched and we had many different options for unleashing all of our energy. We departed on walks through second growth forests filled with banana slugs, kayaked into an estuary filled with great blue herons, northwestern crows, bald eagles and gulls. The highlight for many of our guests was watching a coastal brown bear dancing through Sitkoh Creek, scarfing down the fatty parts of salmon, leaving behind the leftovers for opportunistic scavengers.
We finished our day with family Olympics onboard and relished in how awesome life really is when spent with the people we love, sharing intimate experiences with nature we cherish.
