Morrows to Alaska 2014: Still in Valdez

Today we took a 9 hour wildlife/glacier cruise out of Valdez. It was cloudy/foggy but the rain held off until the last part of the cruise. The trip took us by the Columbia glacier which calves large pieces that were floating as icebergs. There were many of them in the area. We didn't get very close to that glacier. We got very close (1/4 mile) to the next one, the Meares glacier, which is one of the few that is actually growing rather than receding. It did not do much calving while we sat near it and it was very cold as you will note from our picture there.
There were a lot of fishing boats along the way. The were fishing with 1500 ft. long nets that were 60 or 70 ft. deep.
I was beginning to think we weren't going to see much wildlife but the sightings picked up a lot on the return. We say humpback whales that really put on a show of us, sea otters, harbor seals, steller seals, two kinds of puffins and many other sea birds, eagles, and even a black tail deer with twin fawns on an island. It was incredible the number of steller seals along the rocks on Glacier Island. My camera is not a high end one by any means so it was hard to get pictures on animals in the water while moving on the boat. Our friend Dee got good pictures of the tail flip of the whales but I barely got a picture of them at all.