Icy Strait
The quintessential Pacific Northwest image – killer whales plying evergreen water along an exposed rocky bluff below ceaseless spruce-hemlock forest – was but one imprint in the fascination we experienced today observing a gregarious “superpod” of three dozen orcas. A persistent variety of spyhops, breaches, lunges and obvious mating displays kept us rapt through the afternoon.
We awoke to the week’s first cloud cover in Dundas Bay, a remote part of Glacier Bay National Park. Here sea otters backed into loons as scoters and cormorants winged by. Out past puffins and humpback whales we looked down Icy Strait at the morphing forms of Cape Spencer Lighthouse. A high latitude mirage effect known as Fata Morgana created flattened floating surreal forms at this crosswater to the Pacific.
With a tip from a floatplane coming in to the dock at the elfin fishing hamlet we had just visited, we changed our afternoon’s plans and set out west. In a long narrow fjord named for a Russian explorer two centuries before, we spied the distinctive black spikes of killer whales. A long lateral line of thirty-plus whales schooled together into a tight slow formation and incredulously approached our now clutched-out vessel. The multitude passed around and under our ship as we ran around the deck not knowing where to look. Such was our introduction to this aggregated superpod of salmonivorous “resident killer whales”.
Towards the end of a fish-feasting summer, orca families will gather in celebratory throngs. We looked on in awe as a long train of fins moved along a rugged headland, whales erupting in several places at once in dramatic surface displays. We witnessed succession after succession of head-rising spyhops, fast porpoising lunges, water-thrashing tail lobs, and full flying breaches. Amidst this traveling circus, pairs of cavorting whales could be seen rolling, prominently displaying, and frothing the water. It is believed that these seasonal killer whale potlatches are where mating occurs between unrelated families.
Repertoires of calls unique to each resident killer whale family may help the whales mate outside their close relations. We dispatched a Zodiac to employ our hydrophone system and broadcast live underwater vocalizations back to the ship. While we watched the whales go by, we listened to their echolocation clicktrains, whistle calls and other subsurface communications – a full sensory experience.
The boisterous killer whales threw the fear of god into a pod of Steller sea lions as they led us westward out to the pacific open waters of the Gulf of Alaska. Here we were at Cross Sound, a prominent portal eastward to the Inside Passage, where great floods and ebbs of water rhythmically stir currents and cycle nutrients within a great broken archipelago.
As we took leave of the awe-inspiring orca superpod, we looked north up the dreamy ocean-swept outer coast of the Fairweather Range where infamous Lituya Bay is situated. Tomorrow we will sail the other side of these mountains in Glacier Bay National Park to see what archetypical images of this world will develop there.
The quintessential Pacific Northwest image – killer whales plying evergreen water along an exposed rocky bluff below ceaseless spruce-hemlock forest – was but one imprint in the fascination we experienced today observing a gregarious “superpod” of three dozen orcas. A persistent variety of spyhops, breaches, lunges and obvious mating displays kept us rapt through the afternoon.
We awoke to the week’s first cloud cover in Dundas Bay, a remote part of Glacier Bay National Park. Here sea otters backed into loons as scoters and cormorants winged by. Out past puffins and humpback whales we looked down Icy Strait at the morphing forms of Cape Spencer Lighthouse. A high latitude mirage effect known as Fata Morgana created flattened floating surreal forms at this crosswater to the Pacific.
With a tip from a floatplane coming in to the dock at the elfin fishing hamlet we had just visited, we changed our afternoon’s plans and set out west. In a long narrow fjord named for a Russian explorer two centuries before, we spied the distinctive black spikes of killer whales. A long lateral line of thirty-plus whales schooled together into a tight slow formation and incredulously approached our now clutched-out vessel. The multitude passed around and under our ship as we ran around the deck not knowing where to look. Such was our introduction to this aggregated superpod of salmonivorous “resident killer whales”.
Towards the end of a fish-feasting summer, orca families will gather in celebratory throngs. We looked on in awe as a long train of fins moved along a rugged headland, whales erupting in several places at once in dramatic surface displays. We witnessed succession after succession of head-rising spyhops, fast porpoising lunges, water-thrashing tail lobs, and full flying breaches. Amidst this traveling circus, pairs of cavorting whales could be seen rolling, prominently displaying, and frothing the water. It is believed that these seasonal killer whale potlatches are where mating occurs between unrelated families.
Repertoires of calls unique to each resident killer whale family may help the whales mate outside their close relations. We dispatched a Zodiac to employ our hydrophone system and broadcast live underwater vocalizations back to the ship. While we watched the whales go by, we listened to their echolocation clicktrains, whistle calls and other subsurface communications – a full sensory experience.
The boisterous killer whales threw the fear of god into a pod of Steller sea lions as they led us westward out to the pacific open waters of the Gulf of Alaska. Here we were at Cross Sound, a prominent portal eastward to the Inside Passage, where great floods and ebbs of water rhythmically stir currents and cycle nutrients within a great broken archipelago.
As we took leave of the awe-inspiring orca superpod, we looked north up the dreamy ocean-swept outer coast of the Fairweather Range where infamous Lituya Bay is situated. Tomorrow we will sail the other side of these mountains in Glacier Bay National Park to see what archetypical images of this world will develop there.
