A Journal, with Pictures

We docked at around one in the after­noon in at Juneau, Alaska’s state cap­i­tal. We did a lit­tle sight see­ing, includ­ing the famous Red Dog Saloon. At two thir­ty we were picked up by van and tak­en to a dock for a pho­to safari by land and sea. This turned out to be one of the high lights of our cruise. The objec­tive was whale watch­ing and we were reward­ed by observ­ing a phe­nom­e­non called “bub­ble feeding”.We spied a pod of 12 hump­back whales cruis­ing near the shore. They lift­ed their tails and dove and our guide said, it looks like they are bub­ble feed­ing for mack­er­el. In this process they dive below the school and sur­round the fish with a cir­cle of bub­bles, then they ascend with mouths open ingest­ing the fish final­ly explod­ing at the sur­face. We could hear the whales as they climbed and then they broke through the water right next to the boat. They con­tin­ued the bub­ble feed­ing for anoth­er thir­ty min­uets or so. We then made our way past sleep­ing sea lions back to the dock for our land pho­to op.

Bub­ble Feed­ing Hump­back Whales!

We docked still excit­ed about our whale expe­ri­ence and drove to the Menden­hall Glac­i­er. We walked through a beau­ti­ful for­est, past native med­i­c­i­nal plants, streams, and then came out to see the face of the glacier.