Icebergs and Waterfalls - Tracy Arm

Day 39 – June 18 Tracy Arm - Icebergs and Waterfalls!

We woke up to another rainy fall like morning. Hey it’s supposed to be summer. Oh yeah it’s an Alaskan summer; damp. Pulled anchor and headed for Tracy Arm - glacier hunting. Saw a few whales (Humpback and one Orca) in route. There was another whale just outside the entrance to Tracy Arm.

Icebergs and waterfalls; lots of them, and snow down to the waters edge in many places. Beautiful is an understatement. It rained or ‘heavy misted’ most of the day.

We went up Tracy Arm dodging icebergs big and small along the way. When the ice chunks got thicker than we wanted to take Magic through we lowered the dinghy and let Magic float solo, while we headed on. The Miner’s did not follow. We went approximately 2 miles in the dinghy winding our way through the ice. We stopped about ½ mile from the South Sawyer Glacier as the ice got thicker than we wanted to deal with. But we were close enough to see the glacier, beautiful. We did not see it doing any calving, but there were both big and small chunks of ice everywhere. What seemed odd was that there were sections almost clear of ice and other sections full of small chunks and yet other sections with large chunks.

Way up in the channel there were lots and lots of seal with pups, some fairly small. Yes we did get some photos.

On the way back out Glen must have thought he was in the Everglades because he was buzzing through the ice. We came around the final corner before getting back to Magic and there was a Carnival Cruise Ship – The Norwegian Sun. They were headed up to see the glacier. I am sure that we are now in quite a few vacation photos. ‘There were these crazy people in a dinghy zipping around the ice.’

Nicole and I discovered the maximum number of photos that a 2 gig chip can hold – 611 photos. Yep we took a lot of pictures today, and that was just with one of the two cameras we were using and only part of the day. Yes, we will be deleting some I’m sure.

Tracy Arm is somewhat narrow and has very steep rock walls on both sides.

Anchored in the cove just outside of Tracy Arm.

What a great day! We were all exhausted by the end of the day. It’s hard to tell when the end of the day is because it stays light so late. At 10:30pm tonight it looked more like 7:00pm.