If you're an early riser and your cabin room is small, order room service. You need to order it the evening before, true, but there's a payoff. You'll get a full breakfast hours earlier than the food becomes available elsewhere on board. Plus, you can carry your tray wherever you want. Everyone else is asleep. You can walk to the next floor up and eat breakfast in the crow's nest while watching Alaska drift by. We did.
For a while on Wednesday, it was mostly us and our coffee. Slowly, other guests joined. The ship sailed into the mouth of Glacier Bay. Soon, standing by a window with my cup, I discovered sea otters in the blue-gray waters around us. After a while, I realized they were everywhere. They floated in twos or threes, sometimes whole rafts of them. From a distance, they looked like furry potatoes. Sea otters aren't a glorious sight from the top deck. Other folks in the crow's nest claimed to see whales, and I did spot some movement in the water along with a plume that could have been a whale or could have been two sea otters sneezing.
I had failed to bring my binoculars at 6:00 a.m. At the times when I have my glasses on, I can count the barnacles on a whale's backside, but I didn't have those, either. I wanted to run back to my cabin for them while shouting at the whales to ‘hold it right there’ but that didn’t seem like a promising prospect.
This was maybe a form of payback. For years, on vacations at places like Virginia Beach, I would spot dolphins and point them out. My wife, effectively blind without her glasses when we were young, would scramble to get her lenses on. She was always too late. Within a second or two, the dolphins would submerge. They would pop up in a different position after she'd removed her glasses. Sometimes she put on and took off her glasses three times. But I was the only one seeing dolphins, really. Since then, she's had corrective vision surgery.
"Hah!" she said next to a window in the crow's nest. She pumped her fist. She told me she'd seen the fins of two whales in the distance. But this time, it was just plumes for me. That was all. Eventually the crow's nest filled up around us with a couple hundred people all trying to look at Glacier Bay simultaneously, most of them with cameras. It wasn't easy to move around.
The ship's crew set up a microphone in the middle of the crowd. They took turns speaking about the bay. Eventually, they introduced the National Park staff. The park service staff included among them a Tlingit tribal member. The Tlingit have lived in the area for hundreds or possibly thousands of years. Archaeologists and botanists have figured that some green areas of Glacier Bay (forests, bracken, grasses) existed 8,000 years ago. There have been signs of continuous inhabitance uncovered, so it's possible the same tribe has been here the whole time. However, the park staff and Tlingit administered no lessons about the glaciers (none I hadn't heard or read before, anyway) so I plodded down to my cabin and climbed back up to deck twelve. From the Koningsdam, deck twelve provides the clearest view of the shoreline. I took my binoculars.
We passed Reid Glacier on the starboard side. (I rushed from side to side as I needed. After all, there were otters.) The Reid ice was dirty with rocks. Glaciers are nature's bulldozers. They push things around pretty fast, geologically speaking. The edge of Reid had pushed a lot of rocks into the sea. Then it receded. It's a thing that happens depending on sea temperatures, salinity, and the pace of the ice's push down the coast. So the ice kept its land-locked dirty color most of the way to the beach.
Not much later in our voyage but on the port side, we encountered the John Hopkins Glacier. In this one, the ice glowed blue in parts, much as you might see in a picture postcard of glaciers.
This glacier was named after the college in Baltimore. That seems weird but it's what we were told by the park service announcer. It’s not named after Hopkins, the Quaker who founded the school. It really is named after Johns Hopkins University by an alumnus who explored Glacier Bay. I suppose we have to be grateful he didn't name it "Johns Hopkins Where I Got My Degree And My Parents Are Very Proud Glacier” although I think that's supposed to be understood.
The Koningsdam proceeded to spin next to the Johns Hopkins glacier while staying (very nearly) in place. For such a large ship, its turn radius amazed me even though I knew about the azipods beneath the waterline, now. I felt almost sorry we didn't negotiate other, even more narrow spaces or do silly water tricks with the Koningsdam.
My lawnmower doesn't turn as well as this, I thought.
As a group (well, as a captain and four thousand passengers), we proceeded past Clark Glacier and Riggs Glacier while I dashed from port to starboard and back, pointing out sea otters. Not everyone had seen them. A set of four ladies followed me from place to place for a few minutes, long enough to spot the floating, furry brown dots. Two of the ladies used their binoculars to confirm for the others.
"They really are otters!" she declared. Without binoculars, as I mentioned, they might as well be brown potatoes floating there.
Then it was time for me to rejoin my party, play afternoon trivia and, eventually, meet again for dinner.
Evening Dress
At our fancy, nice-shirt dinner we had one more odd thing happen. We got visited by whales.
Out the port-side window, a plume shot up. It was a puff of white against the dark blue sea. Behind everything, the shore trees looked slightly dark in the gradually waning sunlight.
"Oooooh!" Three or four people who had happened to be looking in the right direction made appreciative noises. One of them stood up.
"That was definitely something," Diane told me. She smacked my forearm.
"A whale?" I turned my head.
Before she could answer, another plume shot up. This time, more people rose to their feet. I was among them.
"Good of you to order the whales," I mentioned to the couple whose table I was starting to crowd as I edged toward the window. They made appreciative noises and also made it clear they didn't mind if I and the others got closer.
The Koningsdam was really at top cruising speed. We were leaving each individual whale behind. Sometimes, though, we saw three or four spouts at once. We had to be passing by an extraordinary number of them, an entire pod of humpbacks spread out for a mile. Finally, I got to watch a pair of whales breach together. At least, from the dual splashes, that's what I was seeing. The main thing I noticed was the wide tail fin. Even at a distance, I could tell a humpback was diving. As our guides had explained, once you saw the tail you would not see the same individual again. It would be under the surface too long to pop back up while being still in our changing view. Instead, I stood and watched until the spouting and ripples slowed their appearance.
We traded quips with the couple who had been nice enough to let us lean over their table as we watched. With glances back at a final spout from a submerged humpback, we walked back to our seats.
