A couple of Park Rangers came aboard first thing in the morning and spent the day talking about the wildlife, glaciers, and so forth over the ship's speakers on deck. What a great idea!
Approaching the Margerie Glacier (I think that's the name of this one!) . . .
On the other side of this mountain range - probably within eyesight, is Canada!
We slowed right down in front of the glacier and I couldn't believe the manouverability of this huge ship, not to mention the piloting skills of the captain (or whoever was stearing the ship at the time)! Eventually we came to a stop and stayed there for about an hour.
A couple of videos of the glacier "calving" - that's when large chunks fall off, sometimes creating a huge wave that even rocked our cruise ship and sounded like a massive earthquake - it was pretty awesome!
Holly got to meet one of the Park Rangers at Club HAL today - you can't see it on her jacket, but she was given a Glacier Bay National Park Junior Park Ranger badge! It was very cool - wish I'd been there to meet him and get a badge, too!
Calving stills - in this set of photos, you can see the ice break away right in the middle of the photo where the glacier forms a hollow triangle . . .
Today's towel animal - squid?!
Back on deck - as you can see it's pretty warm for Alaska!
Leaving Glacier Bay.
If you click on this picture and focus in on the small rock formation beside the two white coloured ones, you will what I thought was a brown rock sticking out of the water. In fact it is a whole lot of stellar sea lions sun bathing on a rock - there are so many of them, they've covered the entire island!
This isn't the shot it was supposed to be - in the middle of the picture, a baby humpback whale has just gone under the water - imagine a whale's tail up in the air (didn't click fast enough!).
The Park Rangers leaving the ship.
I had a lobster tail for dinner tonight - it tasted as good as it looked!
On our nightly before-bedtime walk, we saw the door to the front of the ship was open and decided to explore - we had the whole front of the ship to ourselves. We could just make out the bridge up where those windows are behind Holly. She had fun pretending to steer the ship!