July 7 - Kenai Fjord Tour

The day started off 52 degrees and overcast. We donned multiple layers and raincoats and rode our bikes a half mile to a meeting spot for the kenai Fjords tour shuttle bus. We boarded the Catamaran and off we went for a 6 hour tour down Resurrection Bay and around and up into Harris Bay to see multiple Glaciers.  Within 5 minutes of leaving the dock we saw the cutest Otter just hanging out.

Rusurrection Bay was just beautiful. The rock formations were interesting. Half an hour in to the trip the rains came! Fortunately there was an inside cabin so we could get out of the rain. We went down towards the lower end of Cape Resurrection and went by a seabird rookery. Saw Cormorants, Common Murre ( the closest thing that Alaska has to Penquins), Artic Gulls and my favorite, Puffins. Some of the Murres had chicks.

 We also saw a group of Stellar Sea Lions. They don't look very big in the picture but we had seen one the day before at the Sea Life center and they can get up to 11 feet and weigh a ton. We saw 2 Humpback whales. One breached 4 times and with the last breach he almost hit the boat. The captain had to back the boat up to get out of his way. We have seen several breaching whales but it is still awesome to see.

. The weather continued to deteriorate. We saw some beautiful rock pillars one of which had a Bald Eagle sitting on top. I loved the colors in the rock.

 The boat was really feeling the wind and waves and several people got sea sick. The Captain eventually came over the loud speaker and said that the reports he was getting from boats outside was not good and for the saftety of everyone we were going to return to the Harbor and not try to get to Harris Bay. As he said - We won't get to see the Galciers but we were experiencing the beginnings of a gale in the Gulf of Alaska in the Pacific Ocean. The company  refunded

$ 50.00 to each pasenger as we didn't get the entire tour. It was raining hard when we got back to the bikes so we pedaled hard to get back to the camper! We plan on leaving tomorrow and heading around to Soldatna.