Pavlof Harbor, Freshwater Bay and Chatham Strait
As our expedition leader says, “Good morning! Another lovely day in Alaska” – and it was. Freshwater Bay was inhabited this morning by a good series of seabirds, especially gulls and pigeon guillemots. Quiet waters surrounded us as we slowly left that place and headed south, toward Pavlof Harbor. We arrived after breakfast and began our day with a series of hikes, kayak trips around the harbor, and some Zodiac tours along the shore.
There was an extreme low tide, and as we walked along the shore, clams squirted at us, and we had to avoid treading on a good series of different colored sea stars, some almost two feet across! A few crabs tried to avoid us, but we saw them anyhow. The hikes led us to a stream and a waterfall with an adjacent fish ladder, built a long time ago. At this point salmon jump the waterfall and swim into the lake that is fed by snow and ice melt. Some of us made an attempt to walk around the lake, but time precluded this effort. Others took medium hikes, with a walk to the view of the lake, then back.
Justin Hoffman and our hotel manager Mike did a dive in the vicinity of a small island, encountering lovely fish and invertebrates, such as this octopus, which fled the moment it was approached. Yet a good photograph was obtained of some of the suckers and an eye, which is almost as good as the eye of a human.
After lunch, we were again on our way south along Chatham Strait, in search of marine mammals (of which we saw humpback whales and porpoise) and one of the ships of the Alaska State Ferry System, called the blue canoes, because of their color. A loaded barge slowly chugged its way north along the strait, enroute Juneau or some other point north.
In the late afternoon Steve gave us an interesting talk on the magnificent forest of Alaska.
