Day 10, 6/30/2002, Sunrise 4:23am - Sunset 11:19pm, Temp @ Noon: 61º cloudy skies
College Fjord
It's a long haul from Glacier Bay to College Fjord, about 500 miles and it took around 24 hours to make the trip. Along the way we experienced our first night without darkness. We had gotten sufficiently north that the sun never slipped far enough below the horizon to allow total darkness even though there were 6 hours between sunset and sunrise. We entered Prince William Sound (made infamous by the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1987) at ten o'clock in the morning, embarked SW Alaskan Pilots at noon and commenced cruising the glaciers of College Fjord at 2:30pm. The first unusual thing I saw was a group of sea otters puttering around the surface on their backs. Soon we would see many more, College Fjord was lousy with 'em. College Fjord and its glaciers: Holyoke, Barnard, Wellesley, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Smith, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Williams and Amhurst are so named because the fjord was 'discovered' by a group of Easterners who named the glaciers for New England colleges. There were a lot of 'bergs at the end of the fjord so we could not approach the Harvard Glacier as closely as we had Margerie but we could still hear and see the icebergs break off. We stayed at the glaciers and in the fjord until 5:30pm when we began the run to Seward and the end of the ocean portion of our trip.
Created on ... July 14, 2002