Wildlife Cruise around Seward Alaska

I’ve been on wildlife cruises in various places, including one in Kauai that I reviewed in this article, but few have had the success (in terms of species spotted) as the one we took from the port of Seward in Alaska while spending the day before departure on the Viking Orion for an Alaska and the Inside Passage cruise to Vancouver. It has to be said that the weather was superb – perfectly calm, blue skies, sunny and warm and our captain provided both expert commentary and a real understanding about when to pause the engines and just float around the whales, for instance.

Like almost every other place we visited on the cruise, Seward has many boats in the water – not surprisingly as this is one of the main ways to get about:

The cruise itself lasted around 4 hours and although it was organized by Viking, I’m pretty sure it was operated by Major Marine Tours on their Glacier Express vessel. I can heartily recommend their tour if my experience is the norm!

First off, we saw sea otters just floating on their backs in the (I assume) freezing water of the bay. Sea otters apparently have one of the densest coats of all mammals and have up to one million hairs per square inch. A dog might have that number of hairs on their entire body which gives you an idea why these small animals were hunted so ferociously in the last century. Now they just seem to be enjoying life in the ocean!

The trouble with modern digital cameras is that you can take so many images and you just don’t know what to do with them. I’ve been quite harsh in choosing which images to keep, but still have about 20 remaining on my hard drive. I think these two are my favorites though.

Off further ashore, we slowed to a halt as signs of sperm whales appeared – in this case, the mist from blowing water from their heads. Whales are tricky things – you think you know where they are, and then all of a sudden, they appear off in a different direction. With a large 400mm lens on my camera I was constantly sweeping around, and often missing them. Still, I did get a couple of images of their tails – nothing as dramatic as a whale leaping from the water, but at least we saw them!

I have been on a whale watching tour off the coast of Kauai in Hawaii and similar results from that trip! I did see some great dolphins swimming around the boat though!

But back to Alaska. Our next task was to see some puffins. Wow – even with a long lens, those birds are tiny in the distance. This lens is the equivalent of an 8x pair of binoculars and still the birds were just like dots in the water. But then one started to take off by running along the water surface and it was close enough to capture on “film!”

And then it managed to make it into the air, and I still got it in focus. This made my day!

Our final search was for Orca whales and yes, we did see those as well, but as usual they were not in the mood for tricks (assuming they ever are!). This is about as good as it got for me!

I did like the way you can see the wave building as it dives deeper into the water and the reflections of the shore certainly helped make this a little more interesting!

On the way back to Seward, we made a trip to the Bear glacier as it makes it way to the ocean. The small boat here really helps give some scale to the size of the ice at the leading edge of the glacier:

Finally, a little detour into a bay where these incredibly remote cabins can be found. I think they are vacation rentals, but that is the very definition of isolation!

You certainly can’t complain about their view though – this is what they would see from that glass enclosed hut on stilts:

I can whole-heartedly recommend this as a way to spend an afternoon in Seward – entertaining, informative and enough going on to make the hours rush by. If you want to read the rest of the story about this cruise on the Viking Orion, you can find my recollections of Valdez via this link.

You can see my personal selection of the best images from this trip to Alaska in my online portfolio where you can buy prints with free shipping in North America.