Our next to last day on the ship was spent in the majestic Glacier Bay National Park. The neat thing about this day is that instead of going to the national park, the national park came to us. Literally. A small boat with three park rangers pulled up to our cruise ship that morning and they climbed on board. About 9:00 am, the lead park ranger came on a speaker that could be heard all over the ship and gave us information about what we were seeing as we cruised in the bay.
The biggest glacier that we saw that day was the Margerie Glacier. As we were traveling to the glacier, it didn't look that big, but the closer we got, the larger and more impressive it became. Once we arrived at the glacier, the boat stopped and we were able to observe it for an hour before the ship turned around and left the bay. Our park ranger explained that if we were lucky, we might see the glacier calving, which is when a large portion of ice breaks off of the glacier and falls into the ocean. He said it could happen up to several times an hour or it might not happen at all while we were there. Within minutes, we saw it calving and it was incredible! We were lucky enough to see calving at least three more times during the hour we were there and even caught one of them on video.
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| This is another glacier next to Margerie. The reason it looks black is because it is covered with so much dirt from when it carved through the mountains. Under all the dirt is lots and lots of ice! |
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| There were lots of birds hanging out on the ice. |
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| If you look very closely, you will see a brown bear that was spotted by one of the naturalists aboard the ship. |
The waters coming out of the bay can often be a good place to spot humpback whales. The naturalist had told us that 3pm would be the best time during our trip to see them. Sure enough, right around 3 o'clock, we started spotting them in the distance. It seemed like everywhere we looked, we saw another group of them. We saw a calf breaching (jumping) several times and also saw several of the whales laying on their sides and slapping the water with their fins. The naturalist on board told us that she hadn't seen that many whales in several cruising seasons. It was such a wonderful end to an amazing afternoon!
Unfortunately, the evening was not as amazing. Up to this point in the cruise, I had been wearing a motion sickness patch to prevent me from getting sick on the ship. While we were in the bay, the water was like glass so I took the patch off. You have to change the patches every three days and I knew I needed to put a new one on that night, but I got busy and forgot. That turned out to be a HUGE mistake! Once the ship was out of the bay and back into open waters, I got horribly nauseous and could hardly stand up without feeling sick. We tried to go to dinner but I only lasted a few minutes before we had to leave. I went straight to bed and stayed there until the next morning. Luckily, by then, my new patch had kicked in and I was able to enjoy our last day on the ship. Even though the day ended on a low note, it didn't take away from all of the incredible sights we had witnessed earlier in the day.
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