Travel Reference
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sea, and then down she goes. Her calf follows, “Watch for it!” Mark says, and then the
calf dives without showing us anything. “Fluke fake, fluke fake,” Mark says, and every-
one laughs, and then, twenty feet off the bow there is this enormous
POOF!
of exhaled air
and another humpback surfaces to blow spume up our noses. Everybody jumps, including
Mark who, with all the electronic gear in the world on the bridge still didn't see that
humpback coming. He apologizes, first to the whale and then to us. “We're not allowed to
approach them,” he explains, “but if they approach us, that's a different story.”
“We're never going to get to the islands at this rate,” Mark says, but we do, and the
Stellar sea lions are there before us, hauled out on the rocks. My last trip to the Chiswell
Islands I saw two bulls picking a fight while a little cub, oblivious to the action going on
ten feet over his head, was crawling in between them. His mama picked that cub up in her
teeth and flung him over her shoulder. He flew thirty feet and landed with a solid thump
that was easily audible from the deck of the boat, while his mama gave the bulls what for.
Meanwhile, a younger, smaller bull was taking advantage of the situation to take advant-
age of another cow. “Whoa,” the captain said, “this is supposed to be a G-rated tour.”
Things are quieter today, the sea lions piled next to each other like a bunch of immense
flippered and whiskered slugs, lazing in the sun and grunting like contented pigs. Mark
moves to another island, Beehive I, there to bring us in close to a puffin and kittiwake
rookery, where the birds are just beginning to build their nests. The high, vertical cliffs are
streaked with white and the smell of guano is very strong. “They call these islands the
Beehives,” Mark says, “because from a distance, when the birds hatch and start to fly it
looks like a beehive with a bunch of bees swarming around it.” He adds, “If you're in the
bow and you're looking up, keep your mouth and one eye closed.”
Holgate Glacier is our last stop, a blue-white wall hundreds of feet high, perpendicular
to the water. It looks like Superman's Fortress of Solitude. Slabs of ice separate from the
wall with
BOOM!
slam against our eardrums and cascade down to form a river of ice on
the surface of Holgate Arm. People are always very quiet in front of the glacier, I've no-
ticed, I think partly because it's unnerving to stare at something that was a million years
old before the human race was born or thought of.
Probably also partly because they've all seen
Titanic
.
