You Try heaving 20 tons out of the water!
Humpback in Full Breach
A leisurely 2 hour cruise from one end of Tracy to the other to “Tracy Harbour” for an anchoring to go and sightsee the north part of Tracy Arm. Enroute, we stop to watch whales at the entrance. Gulf Island opts to go fishing while On the Edge and ourselves hang out watching the whales. Stroke another item off of Betty’s Bucket list! 3 Full breaches by an adult whale with the camera clicking away furiously. Oceanaire and Ladner Lass are already through the entrance and playing in the ice bergs while we await the Disney Ship “Wonder” to go into Tracy Arm to view the Sawyer Glacier.
Its truly a wonder to see these 30 to 40 ton animals jump clear out of the water and then there is a brief pirouette and a flop back into the water. I use the word pirouette loosely as they do a 180 degree spin mid air and do an actual side flop back into the water. We watched them previously rubbing their bellies on the rocks on shore, probably to get some of their barnacles off! I only have a humpback whale bubble feed, puffins and a moose on shore to capture in my camera viewfinder on this trip and I will have a hat trick of trip goals (life goals) to get
We all anchor separately in the bay as there is a worry of the cruise ship swells coming into the exposed anchorage and bashing us around, so a 5 boat raft is not ideal here. We see the boat “Seawolf” is anchored in this bay (we saw them in Wrangell and then in Sandborn Canal) -- Dinghies are prepped and gloves and touques are the order of the day (having learned that glove and hat trick from Dawes Glacier run) – and we head off for what we think is an 11 mile trip to the Sawyer Glacer. It is in fact, double that in mileage one way --- the wind and tide are making the seas lumpy all the way into the glacier, but we make it as close as we can get before it is too choked with ice to go any further. We encounter a cruise ship coming out (Carnival Cruise Lines) and when we get right into the glacier, we see the Disney Wonder in close. The optical illusion when we first saw the cruise ship in the bay looked like her bow was on the rocks and that they had hit an iceberg…..as we got up closer, she is quite aways off of the cliff face and is about 50 yards off of a rather large iceberg. You can see from the photographs above how it looked when we first arrived. We decide we will turn around and go out in behind the cruise ship as she is clearing up an ice-free path on her way out. Judging from the people out on the decks, we will be in many souvenir cruise ship photographs. Sawyer Glacier appears to be calving quite a lot more than the Dawes glacier as we cannot even get close and judging from the amount of ice bergs in the bay, its been calving a fair amount. We find it a lot warmer in the sun here as the cliffs appear to be higher and the bay smaller. This is truly one of the most scenic arms we have been in with fjord like mountains, lots of greenery, lots of snow fields and a lot of happy smiley faces around us! By the time we get back to Tracy Harbour, there are another 7 boats anchored in the bay – where did they all come from and where are they all going?
Definition of Calving: this is not the official thesauraus definition, but it will explain the meaning --- Calving is the falling off of big chunks of the Glacier into the water. This falling down of the ice creates a tremendous thunder noise and is accompanied by a small wave - or bigger wave if a larger piece of ice falls off.
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