Saturday July 15, 2023
Hi Gang! Our good luck streak continued today! (What fall??) We had a gorgeous and sunny day, we saw tons of whales and Kathy won almost $300 on the slot machine! Life is good and we are so blessed!
So our excursion to do a whale watch was not until 2 PM and we weren’t docking in Juneau until Noon so we had another leisurely morning. Kathy decided to sleep in and I decided to have a fancy breakfast at the Compass Rose. Those New Zealand baby lamb chops were calling me so I had those with some eggs and it was so tasty.
For our excursion we first got on a bus and drove about 20 minutes to a dock and boarded our boat. It was a nice big boat with a top and bottom deck with plenty of spaces to stand outside to spot whales.
Well we were only about 20 minutes in to our 3 hour boat tour when someone shouted “whale at 3 o’clock on the port side”! So we all rushed over to spot the whale. We had a naturalist on board explaining things about whales and she quickly said, “Oh, it’s Sasha”! She then explained that they can identify the whales by the markings on their tail fins and she explained that Sasha had been coming to this area to feed for almost 20 years.
Then she gave us the exciting news… Sasha recently had a calf (baby whale) named Tango and that lately she’s been teaching Tango. Lucky us, (there goes that luck again!) we got to see Mama and Baby do an almost simultaneous dive which the Naturalist said was rare. She said Sasha was probably teaching Tango to dive! We were all just in awe!
The boat then moved to a different area where we saw 3 whales all together. Again the Naturalist said that too was rare since whales normally don’t travel in schools like fish but mostly solo. She felt these may have come together to feed. No matter what the reason, it was cool to see them all blow out of their blowholes at the same time!
The boat then moved again for our last whale sighting. And once again our luck came thru. This time we saw what is referred to as a “bubble net” feeding. That’s when several whales (in our case there were 6 whales!) coordinate swimming in a circular pattern creating a wall of bubbles in the water that act like a net and disorient and capture the fish within this “net” that allows the whales to open their mouths wide and swallow all the fish. The Naturalist again said it is rare to actually get to witness the bubble net feeding so once again we had great luck today!
After that we went back to the ship and got ready for dinner. We went to the Compass Rose and had another excellent meal. I custom made my own seafood platter with Halibut, Lobster and Shrimp. So tasty!
There was no show tonight so after dinner we went to listen to this duo sing and called it an early night since our excursion tomorrow is really early. Tomorrow we’re in Skagway and we’re crossing our fingers that our good luck string continues and we get a sunny day with no rain! Hope everyone’s having a great weekend!
The Wandering Italian 