We have been to Juneau on all 12 of our previous Alaskan cruises, so going back there would be pretty much the same for us. Most of those visits just involved getting off the ship and walking around downtown. Maybe we would take the cable car tram to the top of the mountain. (Sadly, that cable car is now closed due to an accident earlier in the season.) Maybe we would just stay on the ship. This morning was no exception. While Kathleen stayed on the ship, I got off and walked around. I wanted to send some postcards and needed stamps. I found a cute little shop that was also a contract post office with a really nice clerk. We chatted for a while, mailed my postcards, walked around, and took some photos (see them below). Then it was back on board for lunch before our one big excursion of the entire cruise.

But way back in 2007, when we were here with Mike, Carol, Bob and Jude, we went whale watching with a wonderful company called Harv and Marv. At that time, it was just the two guys with two boats, and it was a highly personalized whale watching experience.

We have told everyone this story, but I will quickly repeat it. On that whale-watching trip, we left the marina in their small boat (only six people) and headed out to see whales. About five miles out, just off an island with houses on the shore, we stopped. We saw a woman come out of one of the houses holding something small in her hands. She got into a kayak on the beach and paddled toward us. When she reached the boat, she handed Marv a small plastic container. We then learned that the woman was his wife and that she was bringing us freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. It has become a legend with us. That’s how you build a business. As a retired marketing person, that’s the best marketing you can do. We have told that story again and again, and when people hear it, they want to book with Harv and Marv.

So with all of us coming back to Alaska, we had to book another tour with Harv and Marv. Of course, they now have a bunch of boats, both big and small, and Harv or Marv no longer take you out; they have employees for that. And sadly, there are no more cookies. We were picked up just off the pier by one of their bus drivers (they now have multiple buses) and whisked north to the Auke Bay Marina, where we boarded our boat with our guide for the day, Jace. A very fine young man, and he knew his stuff, but it just wasn’t the same as sailing with the original guys.

If you have never been whale watching, as Mike pointed out while we were out in the boat, it is a lot like fishing. Most of it is just sitting around waiting for something to happen. Except, unlike fishing, when you whale watch, you have to keep looking everywhere for the tell-tale flume as they surface to exhale. Thank goodness they are air-breathing mammals, or humanity might not have a clue they were down there.

So that’s what we did. We drove around and looked. And then there’s the excitement when you find them (or the disappointment when you’re faked out by the wake of another boat). Then you race to get closer (boats are only allowed to be no closer than 100 yards from the whales), but by the time you get there, they’ve gone under again. The next time they come up, they could be a good quarter mile away. Sometimes you get lucky, and they come up closer to your boat, so you get to take pictures.

Here’s the crazy part. Obviously, whales are HUGE creatures, but unless you get incredibly lucky enough to see one breach almost completely out of the water, all you ever see is their backs and their tails. I shot more than 600 photos while we were out looking, and in the photos below, you will probably see only six to eight of the whales—mostly tails. I take that many because I set my Nikon to the highest repeat settings, so when I press the shutter, I get about 20 photos a second (or it seems like it’s that many), and I get a ton of the exact same photos of all the whales. In our years of taking Alaska cruises, I have never seen a breach, so if you like whale photos, below are some tails. It is exhilarating to see one, but when you think about it, it’s fairly anticlimactic.

We saw a couple of other things while we were out. First (and most surprisingly), we saw the sun come out. It was glorious and almost as rare in Alaska as seeing a whale breach. We also saw some sea lions sunning themselves on a buoy. I believe visiting that buoy is one of the highlights of every Harv and Marv excursion. It’s way out in the bay and usually has six or eight sea lions on it. I have photos from 2007 that match the ones I took this week, except these are in the sunshine.

After the sea lions, we headed back to the marina because we had to catch our ship, and Jace had to take out one last tour (he did four that day—Harv and Marv are doing very well). We had dinner, then it was off to bed.

I should mention one other thing about evenings. There are shows—we just don’t go to them. As regular readers of this blog know, we just went on a theater tour to Broadway last month and saw some amazing productions. After that, cruise ship shows just don’t do it for us. I usually will stay up for a comic, but that’s about it. We truly have become old fuddy-duddies. Which is OK. Mike always does a full report on every cruise, and he goes to all those shows, so when he publishes his report, he will have all that and much more (menus, additional ship photos, etc.). I will let you know when his report is up.

Of course, I have photos for you, and they are below. Don't forget: if you click the first shot, you can scroll through using your arrow keys or by swiping. That way, you can see the captions as well. And PLEASE... don't look at my photography on a phone. Please...

Sometimes when I am doing a live blog like this, it is hard to remember the day before yesterday. Especially when you have a really big excursion on the intervening day. Yesterday we were in Juneau and went out whale watching but that’s a story for tomorrow. Today is Hubbard Glacier which we visited on Wednesday—the day after we visited Icy Strait Point.

For the uninitiated, one of the biggest reasons people cruise to Alaska is to see the glaciers. There are four glacier-viewing areas any ship can visit, though some are much better than others. In our 13 cruises to Alaska, we have visited all four. By far the best is Glacier Bay, followed by Hubbard, Misty Island Fjords, and Tracy Arm.

This year, there are only three because Tracy Arm has been experiencing rockslide activity, and the cruise lines are avoiding it. When I first went to Glacier Bay, I was so impressed that I wanted to know why everyone doesn’t go there on every cruise. I found out it’s an environmental issue. Glacier Bay is a national park, and the number of ships that can sail in is highly regulated through a permit process. Because the permits are grandfathered (cruise lines that have been here the longest get first call), if you want to see Glacier Bay, you need to cruise with either Holland America or Princess, as they have been doing Alaska the longest and have the permits to show for it. Or you can take one of the smaller cruise lines that leave midweek, when Princess or HAL are not sailing and not in the Bay. Permits are issued to X number of ships per day.

Hubbard is used by the second tier of cruise lines (in terms of the number of years they have been cruising in Alaska, then Tracy Arm and finally Misty Island Fjords. While in Glacier Bay, you may sail by more than 10 glaciers. When you visit Hubbard, you see two—Hubbard and Turner. Hubbard is the main attraction as Turner is receding.

According to Wikipedia, receding glaciers, also known as glacial retreat, occur when a glacier melts and shrinks faster than it can accumulate new snow and ice. Because glaciers naturally flow downhill like slow-moving rivers, “receding” simply means the ice is melting away at its lower edges—or terminus—faster than the glacier can replenish itself.

Hubbard is an advancing glacier. When a glacier advances, it gains more snow and ice (accumulation) than it loses to melting or breaking off (ablation), causing the end of the glacier (the terminus or snout) to grow and push further downslope or out into a valley.

In layman's (and photographic terms), Hubbard advancing means the front of the glacier is pretty much a beautiful white and blue, while Turner (right next to it) is white but covered in all kinds of black debris. Check out my photos to see what I mean. In the distance above is Hubbard.

Whew! Now that you know more about glaciers than you ever wanted to know, here’s what happened to us on our Hubbard Glacier day. Wait. You still need to know about the ice. As glaciers advance, pieces of ice fall off. And if there is a huge ice field in front of the glacier, the ship can’t go there. And when we went to Hubbard, there was a HUGE ice field in front of us, so we barely got to see her. We spent 90% of our time in front of Turner's dirty face, and later in the day got to see Hubbard from afar.

I created a small map to show you how close we got to Hubbard and its position relative to Turner. We could go no further around the point than into the aptly named Disenchantment Bay due to the buildup of ice in the water. On previous visits to Hubbard Glacier, the ship we were on had been able to get much closer to the face of the glacier—not on this trip. If this were your only cruise to Alaska, you would not get the big deal that many of us make about viewing glaciers.

All this said, I will just let you look at the photos, and the captions will do a better job of explaining our distance, viewing angles, etc.