There is one thing about Seward, it rains --- a lot. In fact it rains or snows 171 days of the year. We were lucky, when we left for on morning whale watching cruise there was only a light drizzle.

We were doubly lucky in that even though we had only a short cruise through Resurrection Bay ( the 4-hour cruise is the shortest given by Denai Fjord cruises) the wildlife was out in force.

There were sea lions and porpoises and gulls and puffins and whales, pods of humpback whales.

The whales really put on a show. According to our captain, some of the whales here had developed a process for feeding. Some of the males make a ring of bubbles to drive their food into one small areaand then the whole pod feeds. Our captains told us that only this one group of whales does this and that the same behavior by the same whales had been observed in their winter grounds off Hawaii.

It was breathtaking to see a dozen or so whales in a very small area coming up out of the water and feeding . Some of them were very big and some were juvenile. The boat had an underwater microphone and we could hear the humpbacks communicating while they were feeding. Even th captain was surprised by the amount of activity.

Then there was the posing puffin. Puffins are comical looking birds with their oversize beaks. However it’s very difficult to get pictures of any bird in flight froma moving boat. However the on puffin landed on the rockface and posed for pictures.

We returned, elated by what we saw and at least for Laura and I,we saw no reason to take any more whalewatching cruises since nothing could top what we saw.

We had lunch and then rode the bus to our ship. One thing nice, those of us on the land tour were allowed to board a couple of ours before everyone else, making the entire process very easy.