Sitka

Sitka today, expect to arrive mid morning, 3 or 4 seals swam by during breakfast but was too slow with the camera. Today is when we have one of the extra trips, we will pick up a local tour boat at Sitka pier and go in search of sea otters and other wildlife. Sitka relies on fishing ( hook & line salmon fishing) and tourism. There is a cruise ship dock which can deal with 2 ships at a time, but this is 6 miles out of town and requires any passengers to be bussed to the town. Being smaller we have sailed into the bay by the centre of town and anchored and 2 of the lifeboats are being used as tenders to transfer people to and from sure. Which catch a tender about 15:00 takes 5 minutes to get us to shore. The pier where we are landed and pick up our local tour boat is opposite probably the most interesting/important landmark which is the fort. Originally built by the Russians, burnt down by the local tribe, then rebuilt by the Russians it is where the formal handover of Alaska from Russia to the US took place with a ceremony of lowering the Russian flag and raising the American one.
On the pier the tour boat arrives, we are close to the front of the queue and went straight into the downstairs cabin towards the front. We had plenty of room as most people dashed to go upstairs into the open air.
Our fist stop was at one of the navigation buoys in the harbour, this is where a group of young Stellar seals were taking an afternoon nap. Sitka itself is on an island and is the only town/port facing out to the pacific, but is protected from the bad weather by numerous small islands. It was around these islands we next went searching, we found a raft of sea otters lying on their backs in kelp by one island. On another isle there were cormorant watching from the rocks and further on we spotted a bald eagle watching us from a tree, before taking off and crossing to another tree on a nearby island, ( my picture of the eagle in flight is blurry so probably won’t use here). From the second tree he was able to watch the family nest containing 2 eaglets on a tree on third island. We now had navigated our way through these islands into pacific. After a short while we spotted whales spouting. The boat closed in on the whales as near as it could get and here we spent 30 minutes, watching the whales diving then scouring the sea to find where they would surface again. Eventually we were taken back to Sitka pier where we disembarked the tour ship and caught the tender back to the ship. The discussion point in the restaurant was Karen saying that she believes the 2 waitresses are twins, I obviously bow to her superior knowledge on the subject of twins. Have never seen the 2 without their masks on, but their stature and the part of their face you can see are very similar so it is probably a correct deduction.Read more