June 24 - Valdez: Prince William Sound

We are enjoying our parking spot looking over a reserve and seeing the bald eagles.   Today we expected to see so much more.  We signed up to take the Lu-Lu Belle cruise in the Prince William Sound.  We had heard this cruise company was smaller, more personal, and the captain makes it interesting and fun.

This is the LuLu Belle.  Originally a 65' yacht, Fred had 10 feet added to the length some years back.

We were picked up this morning by the boat captain "Fred" (black jacket, white shirt).

He takes us to the dock, but we are a bit early for the 11am cruising time.  While he got set up, we looked around.

David wasted no time in checking out the plumbing for the Pump Out station.

After an orientation and safety talk, we did get underway.  The cruise could be about 6 hours or longer, so I was trying to be careful with the camera battery life.  The first wildlife we saw were clusters of sea otters.

 It so hard to decide what to take pictures of.  There is so much to look at and enjoy.

 This was the first good sized iceberg we saw and it captured our attention.  Little did we know, but you'll see later.

 Fred was on a  hunt for puffins.  He nosed into this cave but no puffins.

 

It is unbelievable how close he got to the rock.   Fred considered sea lions the rats of the sea.  He wasn't happy with how they are proliferating and taking over local beaches, but mainly upset with the quantities of salmon that consume.

 

But the puffin hunt continued.  It was unbelievable how he held the nose in this cave.

It was damp and dark with lots of mist in the air, making this a not so clear shot of a puffin.

 The boat wasn't real crowded, but at times it was necessary to take turns.  Fortunately people were real nice about it. 

 We basically had three levels to observe from.  I didn't spend much time inside, preferring the front deck or this observation point.  It was breezy when the boat was moving at speed and definitely got colder when we were surrounded by ice.

Columbia Glacier

The active face of the Columbia Glacier.  We were still about three miles away, but there was too much ice to continue.  The captain said the exposed face was about 300 feet high and there was another 800 feet below the water.  Had we gotten within a quarter of a mile of the face we would not have been able to see the mountains behind.

Joyce is standing on what is called the pulpit of the boat which sticks out the front or bow.

This is all glacier ice that has calved off the Columbia Glacier.  Might be hard to tell in the photo but we are guessing this piece was over a hundred feet long by maybe 50 wide.  That is bigger and higher than the Fletcher house and longer but not quite as wide as our house.  Remember too, that is just the exposed part.  The bottom 90 percent of the glacier is below the water line.  The black part of the face is glacial moraine, it has the rock scraped off the mountains imbedded in it.  After it calves off the glacier, the rock floats with the ice until the ice melts.

We were amazed how Fred would navigate through the glacier ice, sometimes pushing the ice out of the way with the hull.

It was amazing.  So funny to compare it to the Portage Glacier boat, where the captain did not want to get close to the ice.  Fred piloted us through ice like this for about six miles.  He could see a way through, although at times we went extremely slow (which was the best) and he had to do a lot of steering to push ice and not clunk into to big of a piece.

Closer view of the Columbia Glacier face.

This seal was out by itself.

Dall's porpoise

We saw several orca's.  No breaching or any exciting behaviors though.

 Since 9/11/01 they no longer give tours at the end of the Alaska pipeline.  The Trans Alaska Pipeline System {TAPS} carries about 800,000 barrels of oil per day.  The Valdez terminal covers about 1,000 acres.  They enforce a strict water buffer around the facility with severe fines for violations of the boundary.

I took this as we were coming back into Port of Valdez at 8:45 pm.  We were on the boat for close to 10 hours.

 We decided to walk back to the RV park so we could check out some of the town.  These fish were at the fish cleaning station, waiting their turn to become fillets.

 The halibut are on the left.  Below the fish cutters are working away.

 The pros make fast work of the fish.  There are a lot of regulations on fish cleaning and disposal of the remnants.  They don't want fish guts to lure the bears into populated areas.

The parts they dispose of.

More fish waiting their turn.

And back to the RV.  This is a beautiful site (David took this picture at 9:40 pm).  The tall structure in the background on the right is a cluster of nine grain elevators.  At one time the City hoped Valdez would be a more active port and built the grain elevators even though there is no grain farming in this area.  According to Fred, they've been there about 30 years and have never been used.