Saturday, April 28, 2012

Berner's Bay Cruise

The trip was part-planned, part-retail therapy. We'd been looking for a house to buy and been depressed about our options - especially when one house's engineer report came back as "demolish and rebuild the entire structure"! (We're taking the summer off from house hunting.)

Every spring the Audubon Society hosts a birding cruise up to Berner's Bay. We'd always thought to go, but this was the first year we managed it.

The cruise departed from Statter's harbor in Auke Bay early Saturday morning. Armed with binoculars we spotted eagles, bonaparte gulls, glaucous gulls, loons, arctic terns, black oystercatchers, harlequin ducks, cormerants, pidgeon guillemots, and thousands of scoters.

We stopped at the Benjamin Island sea lion haul-out for a look at those creatures. Mr. X managed to get a family photo.

The real show were the six or seven humpback whales along with the six killer whales we spotted. One of the killer whales was a young calf swimming with its mother. The boat we were on usually serves as a whale watching boat so the captain was very good at maneuvering to follow the animals as they worked the shoreline toward the south. 

We cruised around Berner's Bay pausing for a moment at Bridget Point. It was pretty cool to see one of our favorite beaches from the water. We scanned the shoreline for the Berner's Bay cabin, but we did not find it - we're hoping at some point to either hike or paddle out to it.

All in all a successful day on the water. 



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