Today was a long laid back day at sea as we sailed north towards the College Fjords.
I don’t know if it is correct to say ‘sailing’ if you’re on a cruise ship? I mean there are no sails so ‘sailing’ seems quite inaccurate. It’s definitely not ‘steaming’ anymore because there’s no steam engines… and ‘cruising’ just sounds too laid back for the cracking pace these big ships set once they are out in clear water. But I digress.
The College Fjord contains the densest collection of glaciers in North Alaska with eighteen in fairly close proximity being valley, mountain, hanging, and of course the fancy tide water glaciers. Strangely enough, they are all named after Ivy League Universities, hence the College Fjord. The largest and most prominent glacier is the Harvard Glacier, the next largest and actually longer glacier is known as the Yale Glacier. Some of the others are named Wellesley, Brown, Smith and other fancy pants unis by the sounds of it. If you google College Fjord, you’ll probably find thousands of gorgeous photos… and you can imagine us right there but in the most miserable fucking weather you can imagine 😀
As we floated in very slowly there was heaps of icebergs bumping off the side of the ship, some of them called ‘growlers’ are between 200lbs to 2 tonnes. Given the decidedly unattractive view of the glaciers today due to the foul weather, most of the die hards up on the viewing decks were spotting wildlife floating around on the ice. We saw a few fool hard seals, a handful of hapless otters and one lonely bald eagle. Well, I think these creatures are daft, because it is fucking freezing up here! The naturalist tells us they hang out in the fjord among the floating icebergs because it offers a safe haven from the killer whales, as the ice and the animals all appear largely the same on the whales sonar. We have seen exactly no killer whales and I will laugh my arse off if the only killer whale we end up seeing this whole trip, is the one down at Seaworld in San Diego! lol
I did take some photos of some sea otters sitting on the icebergs, but they’re still safely in the camera until I can find the damn cord to download one or two to the to the iPad! 🙂
