Waterfall #104

Have I mentioned how beautiful the scenery is? Everywhere you turn you see another exquisite (I need to remember this word for Bananagrams) view. Yesterday we toured Prince William Sound in Valdez. Everywhere you looked the view was spectacular, absolutely fantastic! Passing by one more beautiful waterfall, someone mentioned the count was up to 104. And glaciers - so many. Yesterday we saw 2 more. The captain had to steer the boat gently through a number of icebergs of different sizes - mostly small. Some had sea otters on them; some had harbor seals. I think the sea otters are the cutest ever, but mean, if cornered. So far we passed a number of rafts of otters which are curious and check us out just as we check them out. We took the boat close to one of the glaciers, and saw it calving 3 times. Early that morning, there was a tremor of 5.3 on the richter scale. We think a fairly large iceberg floating in the water, broke off earlier in the day. On that boat trip we saw a humpback whale, 3 Orcas, lots of bald eagles, a mass of sea lions, harbor seals, sea otters, and many, many birds.

We've been seeing informative displays of the 1964 earthquake and the Exxon Valdez oil spill. One display of the oil spill "hurt my heart" and I couldn't tell any others what it was about. Why should I ruin their day too? The wildlife are still in different stages of recovery. It looks like the herring have been badly affected. There are studies to try to find what, if anything, humans can do to bring back the herring to levels before the oil spill. The earthquake and tsunami of 1964 caused a great deal of destruction and loss of life. Valdez built a whole new town after that, because they decided the existing one was unstable.

A lot of people have been fishing, and bringing back their limit of 6 every day. The salmon are running. They are so thick that they are being foul-hooked. The regulations say you have to hook them near the mouth to keep them. The technique to catch them is to snag them. Doesn't sound like much of a sport, does it? One fellow was saying that some of the salmon they catch have other lures in them - on the side, or... He had one break his line easily, and he thinks that has happened to many others. Some of these salmon get pretty big. The bears come down to feed off the salmon, and there are spots where people wait for the bears to come. Last night there was one just before we got there, and another about 15 minutes after we left. The night before we missed the bear by about 20 minutes. I guess there are no set times when they are ready to eat. Or, maybe they heard we were coming. We should be seeing more bears fishing in a couple stops.

Skittles was in a pet parade tonight. Her first of course, and probably her last. Since she was the only one in the cat category, she won a little bag of cat toys. It was fun, and a few laughs.