Thursday, September 14th - Ketchikan and Misty Fjords, Alaska.

We awoke to another day of dazzling sunlight and a clear blue sky, surely an auspicious omen. Monika and I went up to the Lido deck for an early breakfast and watched the soft, wooded hills of the Inside Passage flow past our window. We spotted a couple schools of humpback whales feeding in the shallower water on the west side of the ship channel, and all attempts at eating breakfast stopped while we tried to take pictures of them. Taking whale pictures is really tricky because by the time you see the spout and train the camera on them, they have already submerged. You have to basically guess where they will surface for their next breath and focus the camera on that spot in the hope they will emerge into your field of view long enough for you to take the picture.

After breakfast we visited the ship's shop, which was selling off Alaska memorabilia for 50% of normal price, some kind of "end of season" sale, I think. A special sale on Russian knickknacks was located on the deck just below the shops and had many intriguing items. We collected some of those: a pillbox, lacquered spoons, and a cute thimble all decorated in a Russian style, as well as a couple of Alaska coffee mugs (made in China).

We also signed up for the "Walk for the Cure" breast cancer walk the next day. It was surely a good cause, but I had to laugh at the legalese on the "Informed Consent and Waver of Liability Form". I will now quote one sentence from it verbatim, and I challenge the Gentle Reader to take a deep breath and try to read it aloud from start to finish in one breath:

If you read these nine lines of typed text with one breath, you are a better man than I, Gunga Din! Isn't it amazing what a pretty pass America's over-legalization has brought us to? I was puzzled that "Minor Children" and "Walk" were capitalized, but maybe lawyers use a different kind of grammar and punctuation as well as a different vocabulary than the rest of us. It was, however, clear that my cunning plan to sue for compensation for the damage caused to my shoes by walking five kilometers from the heir of the servant of the assigned successor to the operator of the Holland America Line, Inc., was doomed to failure. Curses, foiled again! As Bobbie Burns would put it, "The best laid plans o' mice and men gang aft agley".

In any case, we picked up our "free" ($15 donation) T shirts with a pink ribbon for the walkathon and the obligatory pink armband that we were supposed to wear for the walk. I was also instructed that we would drink pink lemonade as our official refreshment during the walk. Boy, these Susan G. Komen people sure know how to make a guy feel welcome. At least I didn't have to wear frilly pink underwear to do the walk; I would have drawn the line at that! After all this, we went back up on deck to watch Ketchikan float by. We were especially enchanted by all the sightseeing planes docked everywhere and flying overhead.

We docked at Ketchikan, Alaska, shortly before 2 p.m. and immediately embarked on a small twin hulled sightseeing boat for our trip to the Misty Fjords National Park. Even though the catamaran went skimming along at 39 miles per hour (according to my GPS), it took us over an hour to reach the park. Along the way we stopped at Eddystone Light Island, which is a pencil thin island jutting up above the surface of the bay. Our tour guide said that the pinnacle was volcanic in origin and had been forced above the water by the seabed rebounding from the weight of the glaciers after the last Ice Age. We also stopped at the nesting site of a pair of bald eagles, but they were soaring so high above us that they were mere motes in the sky and impossible to photograph.

The Misty Fjords themselves were exotic combinations of sheer rock and tree-covered slopes plunging into quite narrow fjords. It was reminiscent of what I saw in Norway's fjords back in the 1980s and really quite beautiful. Our guide explained that the basic rock was volcanic in origin, but the tops of the mountains had all been smoothed over by the thick glaciers that had also formed the valleys. These valleys ultimately became fjords when the sea levels rose after the last Ice Age.

The catamaran roared into the park leaving a broad foaming wake behind us. Inside the park we saw some spectacular formations of steep mountainsides dropping into the deep, cobalt blue water of the fjords. The mountainsides in one spot had been formed by glaciers into a shape like a huge punch bowl, and that was just fantastic. We also saw curious patterns of light and dark rock on the bare faces of the mountains, probably due to intrusions of metamorphic gneiss into the basic layer of dark volcanic basalt. We looked in vain for bears, black-tailed deer, or other wildlife such as bald eagles, but no luck.

On the return trip we worked our way through a channel that was so narrow that our boat had about 20 feet on each side of it. Shortly thereafter we eased very slowly up to a little rocky islet that had five to ten harbor seals lying on it, basking in the sun. On the shoreline just across from the islet we found an Indian pictograph of a central circle with rays made from dots coming out of it. Our guide said that the pictograph might have signified a good salmon fishing ground for the transient tribes of hunter gatherers who frequented the area. Of course, everyone knows how much bald eagles like to eat salmon, so we were hoping to see some bald eagles hovering around, but no luck.

The Captain turned the ship's bow back toward Ketchikan and we docked there about an hour later. Gathering up our maps, coats, and miscellaneous stuff, we walked down the gangplank. Just then a bald eagle flew serenely by about 50 feet above our heads, but neither Monika nor I had a hand free to wrestle out a camera and take the picture. So we just watched him flap off into the distance and then continued walking into town. Sigh!

We still had an hour until we had to reboard the ship, but we figured that was enough time to briefly visit the old historic district of Ketchikan. In particular, Phyllis and Lois wanted to see Creek Street and we hustled over there as the sun was setting. Creek Street is a creek that has houses built up on stilts on both banks, effectively making a "street" with water instead of pavement in the middle. Although the old wooden buildings on stilts lining the banks have quite different shapes, sizes, and colors, somehow it all works together to create a unique and pleasant scene. We had seen Creek Street when we briefly visited Ketchikan on a previous cruise about 10 years back, and it was nice to see that it was just as quaint and picturesque as we remembered it.

Dusk was falling by the time we finally returned to the Zuiderdam, checked in, and headed to the Lido deck for a late supper. The meal gave me the energy to complete a couple of Sudoku puzzles while Monika downloaded and processed the pictures we had taken, after which I worked on the journal until it was time for bed.