Wow, we have been traveling for a month! I can’t imagine trying to do this trip in any less than three months, which sounds so long; but we moor in a new location almost every night, and I still get that FOMO feeling when we pass a promising anchorage by.
The theme for today’s post is Ice. Ryan and I stayed in the Petersburg area today and took the boat for a day trip to Le Conte Glacier on the other side of Frederick Sound. The weather was a bit murky when we left.
The Le Conte Glacier is the southern-most tide-water glacier in North America, so I suspect it probably calves a lot on the warm days like we’ve seen lately. There was a lot of ice today. It’s been a while since we’ve cruised with the bergs, so I’m afraid I got excited about every new ice shape and color. So many of them looked like birds or dragons.
The color of the big ice was such a vivid blue.
We saw lots of harbor seals. Glacier inlets must be a good environment for seal-rearing, because many of the ice bergs sported seal moms and pups.
The ice kept getting thicker, as we moved further into the inlet. With the ice passing closer and closer to the boat, I used the fishing net to scoop up some small berg-lets to chill our cocktails in the coming days.
Finally, it was just too icy to proceed. Ryan and I didn’t want to damage the boat or outboards or get trapped by ice closing in behind us. While we didn’t quite make it to a place where we could get a view of the glacier terminus, we were glad to have seen the seals and enjoyed the ice bergs a lot. We consoled ourselves with morning tea by Thunder Falls.
By the time we left Le Conte Bay, the weather had turned nice again. We have been lucky with the sunshine lately, as June is still pretty early for summer weather in Alaska.
Tonight we are back in Petersburg, but tomorrow we will return to the wilderness. We have noticed that the satellite dish is starting to struggle to find a satellite signal as we travel further north, so between that and the lack of cellular coverage, I’m not sure how much posting I will be able to do in the coming days. We are leaving the published coverage area for the satellite internet service soon, so any internet connection we continue to get going north is a bonus. There may be no change to the posting schedule, but If our posts stop for a while, please don’t be concerned because it is almost certainly due to a lack of internet connectivity.
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