We finally arrive on day #5, back in Seward to take cruises to explore the Kenai Fjords National Park area.

In this part of Alaska, there are two possibile cruise options. One is the Kenai Fjords National Park cruises that depart from Seward, Alaska and the next is the Prince William Sound Glacier Cruises that depart from Whittier, Alaska. If you want to see wildlife, do the Seward based cruises. If you want to see glaciers, do the Whittier based cruises. We did both. We wanted to do the wildlife cruise and take an airplane to fly over the glaciers, but since the weather was so bad, we ended up taking two cruises. [There are some day long cruises that depart from Seward that not only show you wildlife but also show you glaciers, we went with a much shorter evening cruise though]

There are many cruises that depart from Seward, we took the Major Marine tours since they had a park ranger on board every cruise. The ranger filled us with so much information about the area and she spotted many many types of wildlife and at least a dozen bald eagles for us. I strongly recommend them.

Bald eagle in ocean, Nikkor 70-200 VR AF-S

Empty deck, Tokina 12-24



Dramatic clouds, Tokina 12-24

Glacier in hills, Nikkor 70-200 VR AF-S

You get to see some glaciers in this cruise, but these are not tide water glaciers you get to see in the Whittier cruises. Now, a visit to Alaska is never complete without seeing tide water glaciers, more on them when I get to that cruise.



Seagulls in rock, Nikkor 70-200 VR AF-S



Sea lions, Nikkor 70-200 VR AF-S



Humpback whales and boat, Nikkor 70-200 VR AF-S

I consider myself so lucky to have witnessed a humpback whale and its calf in the ocean only a few hundred yards from us. They briefly popped their head up, but it was raining so darn heavily at this point, I had put my camera away and was enjoying them without the puny D70 eyepiece preventing me from seeing them :D .

Whoever said that the human eye has the FOV of a 50mm lens in 35mm speak must have either been an engineer or a lens salesman. They know nothing about it in real life :D . It was pretty dark there. This photo was shot at f/2.8 at ISO 1600, btw. The whales appeared bigger to my brain that what you see here in the photos.

My wife also sighted beautiful Dalls Porpoises in the ocean right next to us, swimming in pairs. I was so busy mucking with my camera searching for them, I did not even sight them :( . In future, I will leave wildlife photography to the real pros and grab a binocular with me :D .

Lost in thought, Tokina 12-24

Waterfall, Seward, Tokina 12-24, 10:40 pm


 We saw this waterfall from the cruise, so we drove down to the waterfall, which is very close to the city and saw it in person. It was 10:40 pm and still some decent light :)

Sahana and oil spill, Tokina 12-24


 Another lesson learnt was not spending enough time in Seward. Please give yourself a LOT of time in Seward, it is a beautiful town. Seward also has a beautiful Alaska Sealife Center which was in our schedule, but we could not make it because of lack of time.

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