The National Park Rangers boarded our ship around 8am and for the rest of the day, it was all about the "picture of icy wilderness unspeakably pure and sublime" said by John Muir a Scottish born naturalist that placed the wilderness bays of Alaska on the map.

The Rangers point out areas of interest all morning, over the speakers in the cabins, so you can venture out to see what was hard to see by ourselves.

We rugged up, layer upon layer, and threw on the raincoats also, as it was unfortunate – it wasn't the best of days for visibility due to the fog and rain. Shame, but nothing we got hung up about, as to date we’ve had really good weather.

Our cabin deck was the best place to view everything as the Captain turned the ship 360 at all the spots of interest, and not once but twice.    We made our way up the Tarr Inlet, a narrow and delicate fjord once a glacier, to the Margerie Glacier both approachable and active.   As we approached the glacier face you could hear the carving of the ice, loud crashes at times frightening because it was so loud and sounded so close.

We then moved back down the arm to Lamplugh Glacier, the fog lifted and this is what my postcard picture would be of the day, not as wide or high as Margerie but pristine and visually we could see the whole face from our balcony.

The Glacier Bay National park has an abundance of wildlife on the shores:

Brown and Black Bears, Moose, Mountain Goats, Grey Wolf, Coyote, Hoary Marmot, Porcupine

In the sea:

Sea Otters, Harbour Seals, Whales, Stellar Sea Lions, Orcas

And birds which include Puffins – Horned and Tufted, Bald Eagles, Black Oystercatchers, Pelagic Cormorants, Mew Gulls, and common Seagull.

Breakfast was late, so lunch was small and then dinner was just fruit, as we spent most of the afternoon sitting by the windows on sun deck lounge chairs in hope – watching for all the animals, at the mouth of Glacier Bay. It become so rough at sea at the mouth of the bay, no animal would be silly enough to be around in such weather. So rough in fact that the swimming pools water was splashing out of the pools onto the decks.  

We did get to see Wilson carve an ice carving in a short 15 – 20 minutes, of a fish. Wilson carves all the ice and fruit sculptures on the ship.

We all felt a bit seedy, but nothing a small pill won’t help, Dad decided to have an early night, Mum and I had a bit more go in us and we ventured to a show – that we noticed even the dancers wore low heels to cope with the rocking ship.   We are out of the passage, and the weather has gone rainy and cloudy, we’ve had it good so far, so no complaints from us.

It was a good time for me to download all my pictures and get up to date with the blog. Enjoy!!

On more day on the Island Princess.