Sunday | May 22nd

Morning mist and a drizzle does not deter our gung-ho passengers.

We set out to kayak from 7:45 a.m. until 11 a.m. all the way up the bay with a 20 minute stop within the first 75 minutes. Take a 1 hour lunch stop and end up going against the tide again and a pretty big fetch area for the wind to develop white caps. Our going was slowed and folks were visibly feeling like this was a big work-out, so I called and asked for assistance after we put in another 90 minutes.

Bosun Aaron gives us a ride back, which was a blast and saved us from getting back an hour late from our “all aboard time” at 2p.m.

The skies are clear and we have some of the best whale watching ever! One of the local pods (about 30 individuals) of killer whales come alongside our boat. Mothers with newborns were seen alongside the 6-foot tall triangular dorsal fin of the males. All of the guides do a marine mammal interpretive session before conducting a man-overboard drill in which passengers don life-jackets.

Later, our bow camera shows the extraordinary show for 20 minutes of bow-riding Dalls porpoise and right when dinner was called and folks had their appetizer, a repeat of last night where we saw our first humpback only an hour from departure…except this time one of the two whales breached repeatedly for 25-minutes.

“O.K., everybody, say WOW backwards. What an unbelievable episode of whale watching and particularly of the porpoises right now…” I stated over the microphone. I then gave the directions of where we were headed. We have Kupreanof at 1 o’clock, Five Fingers Lighthouse at 3, beyond that are The Brothers with the southern tip of Admiralty or Kootznahoo Island with even taller Baranof in the far distance and on our port side we have the coast range with the B.C. Canada border only 30 miles inland.

Dinner has breaching humpbacks and three meetings (last one finishing on the bridge at 10:00 p.m. for staff to hammer out details for our next day activities. I spend an hour updating our wildlife sightings list and studying up on the natural history of my feathered friends and photo-copy Google Earth images of our hike that begins at 06:15 in the morning. I’ll need to be up at 5:30 to drop boats and kayaks….

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