On our last full day on board the Sea Bird we took Zodiac cruises through the ice floes in Tracy Arm, off the South Sawyer Glacier. Literally hundreds of harbor seals were hauled out on small pieces of ice, mainly mothers and pups, often nursing, and many more were in the water throughout the area. The bleats of mothers and pups calling to each other when separated on foraging trips were regularly interrupted when the South Sawyer Glacier calved half a mile away, with no reaction by the seals to the "gunshot" sounds of the ice breaking away. The quiet puffs of a lone harbor porpoise were also heard as it surfaced among the ice, a rare sight so close to the face of the glacier. The only other sounds were the crackling of melting ice, the cries of Arctic terns, mew gulls, and pigeon guillemots as they foraged in the area, and the distant roar of waterfalls.
The sky was incredibly clear, our seventh day of amazingly good weather, quite untypical for Southeast Alaska!
