Selene Friends:
For those of us in the Northwest US, Alaska is a favorite destination. For those of you out of our area....put Alaska on your bucket list. No...coming on a cruise ship does not count.
There are dozens of reasons to come to Alaska, including indescribably beautiful scenery, amazing fishing, and wildlife encounters, among others. There are also some really wonderful people who call Alaska home and virtually all of them are very welcoming to visitors. Yes, it rains a lot and can be cool, but it's so worth it!
Today, we had a wildlife encounter that I just had to share with you to help make my point.
There are a lot of humbpack whales in Alaska. They are magnificent creatures and it's exciting to see them at any distance. We try to be very careful about respecting their space and we do not "chase" them (they can so outrun us anyway!) and we try to always maintain a safe distance--at least 500 yards.
So, today as we were going into one of the hundreds of beautiful protected inlets in SE Alaska, we saw a group of humbpacks "bubble netting".
For those of you who are not familiar with it, bubble netting is an amazing behavior where a group of whales work together to herd small fish, like Herring into a tight group where the whales can more easily "scoop up" a large number of them. The whales swim around in a large circle, exhaling out their blow holes on the top of their head to create a "net" of bubbles that alarm the small fish and contain them in a tight ball. Then the whales will swim down under the group of fish and surface with their mouths open to capture a bunch of fish. It's absolutely amazing to watch. If you come to SE Alaska on your Selene, you stand a reasonably good chance of seeing whales bubble net.
When we saw this group today, they were perhaps 600-700 yards away and we had stopped the boat just so we could get a better view and photos. We saw the whales come up in a group as they do at the end of a netting operation. And then they all submerged. We figured the show was over.
Fortunately, we hadn't started moving again because a few minutes later a group of eight to ten animals surface DIRECTLY in front of us. I had sat back down in the pilot chair and suddenly saw a bunch of whales appear above the anchor platform only a matter of a few feet in front of us! My heart skipped a beat (or twenty)!
We were just drifting and felt one of the animals bump our hull--not with enough force to cause any issue, but we were definitely bumped!
The best part was that my cousin had been out on the bow trying to capture video of the group bubble netting some distance from us, and she was still there when they surfaced in front of us. She managed to get several seconds of video after they'd come up with their mouths open, but it will give you a good idea how close they were! Incredible!
So.....if this doesn't convince you to come to Alaska....I'm not sure what will.
Check out this video on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/_TX6raAkL3E
(The screaming voice is my cousin, who is from Phoenix and has never seen whales in the wild!).
Mark Tilden
Selene 60 "Koinonia"