Sean's Online Journal: Seward and Kenai Fjords

After spending the night in Talkeetna, we made the long drive down to Seward, ultimately spending three days and four nights there. Seward’s the largest town on the east side of the Kenai Peninsula. This actually isn’t saying much, as there are only two other towns of any size – Whittier and Valdez – anywhere in the area, and it’s a long drive around the mountains to get to them.

Seward is situated at the head of Resurrection Bay, an amazingly fertile part of the ocean. It used to be one of the biggest commercial fishing ports in the world, and it still does pretty well. Now however, much of its income is provided by tourism for its beautiful surroundings. It’s a cruise ship transfer point, where ships touring the Inside Passage up from Seattle or Vancouver debark their passengers to ride trains to Anchorage or Fairbanks.

While they’re there, some cruise passengers take a side excursion to Kenai Fjords National Park. This park has only one section accessible from land, Exit Glacier (more on that later). For anything else you must go out into Resurrection Bay by boat. The dominant tour operator is Kenai Fjords Tours, and they do a really good job. We took a half-day kayak / half-day boat tour with them. We hopped on a KFT fast catamaran, the Aialic Voyager (look that word up), to get us to the kayaking area on Fox Island out in the bay. It was a low, overcast day in the Bay, but it was just fine for us. (Remember it was well into triple digits in Dallas.) Sunny Cove Kayaks actually did the tour, and we were a small group: Our three and a father and his two daughters, and our guide Tom. Sadly, Connor ended up with the cute high school senior. He manfully faced up to his fate.

We saw lots of seabirds, but – perhaps fortunately – no encounters with the larger fauna of Resurrection Bay. Tom said that the local pod of orcas (killer whales) would occasionally beach themselves on the exact same gravel beach on Fox Island that we launch from to scratch themselves. Wouldn’t that be a sight! Part of me would have loved to have seen orcas out kayaking, but that primitive part of me, the back of my brain, would have been screaming bloody murder. We also saw LOTS of bald eagles; we became pretty good at spotting them by looking for those white heads in the green fir trees. We kayaked a total of about five miles in the bay, an easy excursion because to our (and the guide’s) surprise the water wasn’t even very cold.

As part of the excursion we had lunch back at Fox Island: fresh salmon or prime rib. Are you kidding? I took the salmon! It was good but just a little bit dry in places, as it was served in chafing dishes big-hotel-conference style to our little group…and about two hundred other people from other KF boats! Suddenly we were surrounded, swamped by people, 99% of which were from cruise ships. It was a rather jarring welcome back to civilization. It was at least an international crowd, so that was interesting.