George Island and the Inian Islands
This morning we woke up to the gentle roll of the ocean swell, at anchor, in a sheltered cove off of George Island. This morning we took advantage of an extremely low tide to investigate tidepools. Look!!!! A seastar (sunflower seastar), a fish (a sculpin), a crab, a shrimp; everyone was shouting out everything they were finding. Others were turning over rocks (imitating the brown bear we had seen yesterday) and discovered gunnels, which are a dark eel-like fish that hide under the rocks. After this excitement, the kayakers went off to explore the sculpted shoreline of the island, while the hikers stomped through a boot sucking mud trail to the lookout point.
After lunch the captain repositioned the boat to another sheltered cove in the middle of the Inian Islands. Zodiac operations began and everyone got to experience the excitement and the curiosity of the Steller sea lions, the largest of the sea lions. They were all over: some were swimming in the middle of the channel thrashing the salmon they had just caught, others were resting on the rocks. But the curious ones followed us around and in one instance, with the motor off, one of them touched the zodiac with its nose. And while driving around their haul out, some of them followed us jumping completely out of the water and darting under us. I am not sure who was more excited, us or them… On the way back to the Sea Lion (the ship), we stopped at the kelp beds to look at sea otters. They were curious of us too, but kept their distance (and so did we).
This morning we woke up to the gentle roll of the ocean swell, at anchor, in a sheltered cove off of George Island. This morning we took advantage of an extremely low tide to investigate tidepools. Look!!!! A seastar (sunflower seastar), a fish (a sculpin), a crab, a shrimp; everyone was shouting out everything they were finding. Others were turning over rocks (imitating the brown bear we had seen yesterday) and discovered gunnels, which are a dark eel-like fish that hide under the rocks. After this excitement, the kayakers went off to explore the sculpted shoreline of the island, while the hikers stomped through a boot sucking mud trail to the lookout point.
After lunch the captain repositioned the boat to another sheltered cove in the middle of the Inian Islands. Zodiac operations began and everyone got to experience the excitement and the curiosity of the Steller sea lions, the largest of the sea lions. They were all over: some were swimming in the middle of the channel thrashing the salmon they had just caught, others were resting on the rocks. But the curious ones followed us around and in one instance, with the motor off, one of them touched the zodiac with its nose. And while driving around their haul out, some of them followed us jumping completely out of the water and darting under us. I am not sure who was more excited, us or them… On the way back to the Sea Lion (the ship), we stopped at the kelp beds to look at sea otters. They were curious of us too, but kept their distance (and so did we).
