I flew into Petersburg, Alaska, got a quick ride to the Scandia House Hotel, and called the captain of our scheduled yacht for a report on the whale viewing assessment. His response was not the one I was hoping to hear. “The humpbacks are not bubble-net feeding, herring are everywhere and extremely abundant right now, so the whales are scattered, making it challenging for good viewing and photography. There has been almost no bubble net feeding for weeks!”
A wave of anxiety came over me, but I knew Harley—our captain—and so does a fleet of other people throughout southeast Alaska. He was born and raised in Petersburg, worked on boats ever since he was a kid and has an amazing network of informants throughout the area. For decades he has been piloting boats for fisheries work as well as tourism. He’s blunt, honest, pragmatic and a resourceful problem-solver. If you are a tour leader, like me, and find yourself leading a whale tour without whales, Harley is the captain for you.
Harley and I talked about our situation and developed a plan for how to proceed. Actually, Harley developed the plan, and I immediately told my group that “we” developed the plan, so I could take credit for his wisdom and good judgement. We decided to go ahead and attempt to photograph whales for much of the first day to confirm for our clients, and ourselves, that under current conditions whale photography would be unproductive and that we should focus on photographing other things until the herring abundance declined, and whales started to congregate and begin bubble-net feeding again.
Soon after we boarded our boat we received an orientation, safety lessons and we motored from the Petersburg docks north and then west in Fredrick Sound. After leaving Petersburg, we encountered and photographed a small group of Steller sea lions comfortably lounging on the top of a red buoy. As a few other sea lions attempted to climb on and join them, it became apparent that the buoy was a piece of cherished real estate, and the occupiers were not expressing any neighborly love for their brethren. That made me glad I wasn’t a Steller sea lion looking for a place to stay.
As we motored along the shoreline, an adult bald eagle was perched in a nearby tree providing some nice portrait opportunities. Then it leaped off the perch and tipped broadside providing wonderful full-frame action shots of an eagle maneuvering in flight with a beautiful soft green background. Made me wonder if Harley had this bird on contract.
As we approached the Five Finger Lighthouse, near the junction of Fredrick Sound and Stephens Passage, we started seeing some humpback whale activity. We were able to get photos of whale tails, spouts, and lunge-feeding, sometimes even with the lighthouse in the background, but no sign of bubble-netting. Harley showed us his sonar scope where herring were so abundant, right under the boat, that you could see huge volumes of area taken up by the multitudes of these small prey fish. We saw one whale lunge feeding on them right near our boat.
After spending the afternoon and early evening in Fredrick Sound, not seeing many whales, none of which were bubble-net feeding, and after Harley had reached out to numerous contacts within 50 or so miles of where we were, it confirmed our situation. The humpbacks were not bubble-net feeding and would not start until the super abundance of herring declined. Realizing that what whales decide to do is beyond the control of any of us, we decided our best plan would be to turn to alternative subjects, to remain flexible and opportunistic, hoping the whales would start bubble-net feeding before the end of our tour. Fortunately, in southeast Alaska there are considerable alternative subjects to photograph while we hoped and waited for the humpbacks to start bubble-net feeding.
Accordingly, we headed north out of Fredrick Sound into Stevens Passage, photographed the Five Finger Lighthouse, turned southeast following Endicott Arm, and finally turned north up into Tracy Arm where we put out some shrimp and crab pots, anchored and spent the night.
Early in the morning of our 2nd day we headed south out of Tracy Arm, turned southeast following Endicott Arm, and continued to where it ends at Dawes Glacier. The scenery from Endicott Arm was spectacular! Very high, glacier-polished, solid rock mountains with sparce vegetation and abundant, amazing waterfalls, many of which fall hundreds of feet, ending where it enters Endicott Arm. The water in Endicott Arm is a beautiful jade color. This is caused by the fine particles of pulverized rock from glacial activity which absorbs and scatters sunlight in ways that can give water that striking blue-green color.
Moving up through Endicott Arm we passed quite a few floating icebergs very diverse in color and shape. Some were just white, like compacted snow, while others glittered in the sun looking more like polished blue glass than ice. Looking at the shapes of these ice bergs brought back childhood memories when we used to look at puffy clouds and describe what objects they resembled. We saw ice bergs that appeared to resemble the shape of mushrooms, human faces and one, believe it or not, resembled an old painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, during the revolutionary war!
As we approached Dawes Glacier at the tip of Endicott Arm the water was littered with icebergs, some being used as resting sites by harbor seals, with both adults and pups being present. Up on the mountain side, to the south of Endicott Arm, we observed and photographed several mountain goats making their way through rugged rocky terrain and feeding on vegetation where it existed.
We photographed a black bear eating rock lichens off the side of the mountain from less than 50 yards away. I’ve never seen a black bear work so hard to get so little as I did in this case—and I was a wildlife research biologist focusing exclusively on black bears fulltime for 25 years of my life. The bear worked obsessively with his claws and teeth to peel the lichens from the rock. His claws were worn down to just stubs of what a normal claw should look like. I have heard of mountain goats and bighorn sheep eating rock lichens as part of a subsistence diet, but I have never seen or heard of black bears eating them before. The bear was very thin, and I suspect it was just trying to minimize weight loss until the berries become ripe later in the summer and, better yet, when Alaska salmon start migrating up shallow streams and they start eating in excess of 20,000 calories a day in preparation for another long and cold Alaskan winter.
We were making our way back up into Tracy Arm headed for another anchorage when we were treated to a beautiful sunset with dark blue water in the foreground, and a collection of warm yellow, orange and reds in the sky, closer to the sunset.
Radio reports indicated that virtually no bubble-net feeding was being observed anywhere near where we were.
During the early morning of Day 3 we decided to head back to Stephens Passage and try our luck there. Before heading out of Tracy Arm though, we collected the bounty from the crab and shrimp pots that were set the day before. We caught a lot of shrimp, less so with crabs (we only caught one and released it) but, at least from a weight perspective, our most abundant catch consisted of sunflower sea stars. I never knew much about sunflower sea stars before, but after doing a quick internet search, was amused to learn that they are the heaviest and fastest known sea stars, weighing up to 13 pounds and moving up to 10 feet per minute on their 15,000 tube feet. Their fleshy limp body relies on fluid pressure to maintain its form!
During day 3, at multiple destinations, we observed and photographed sea otters lounging around in beds of kelp. In one scene, an otter rose up from the water with kelp draped over both shoulders and hanging down like a bathrobe. In another scene two otters were lying on their backs and sitting back with their feet sticking up, looking very much like they were waving goodbye! My favorite sea otter photo though for this trip was when one surfaced proudly posing with a bright yellow-orange Dungeness crab. It looked like some kid posing for a photo after winning a 4-H prize at the county fair!
We also observed several blacktail deer along the shorelines. In one case we photographed a mother nursing her fawn.
One of our best photo opportunities during Day 3 was a humpback whale calf, repeatedly breeching, sometimes so close to our boat that it was too close if you had a lens over 400 mm.
At the end of Day 3 we decided that the next day we were going to visit Pack Creek Bear Viewing Area on Admiralty Island if the humpback whale bubble-net report continued to be negative. Well, the next morning, like all the previous mornings, the bubble-net feeding report was negative, so we made our way to Pack Creek.
When we arrived at the Pack Creek, we were met with an employee from the United States Forest Service and given an orientation regarding bear safety rules and appropriate behavior while at this site. Almost immediately two brown bears came out and fed briefly on sedges, but they were several hundred yards away. Not much longer, though, a mother and yearling brown bear came out of the forest near us, walked down a log and right past us providing excellent photos!
In the early afternoon of Day 4, shortly after returning to the boat from our Pack Creek excursion, Harley had some good news and some bad news. The good news was that humpback whales were finally being observed bubble-net feeding near Point Adolphus; the bad news was it would take us 18 hours to get there, and if we decided to go, we would probably only have enough time to go there, spend one day, then return to Petersburg. We met as a group on our boat and decided to go for it—and it was one of the best decisions of our trip!
Midday, on Day 5, we arrived at the location where bubble netting had been observed the day before, and soon after we got there, they started up again! It was a bonanza. For the rest of the day, we had bubble netting going on near us, sometimes less than 50 yards from our boat, and really close to other boats that had come to see the spectacle as well. It was wonderful immersing ourselves in the excitement of an experience that we thought was going to elude us on this trip! After many opportunities to photograph the whales, I finally just sat my professional photo gear down, relaxed, pulled out my cell phone and just documented the activity on video for fun. Roughly a dozen whales surfaced nearby, and for several minutes moved in mass, in the same direction, going down briefly, creating spouts, raising tails, and continuing in a column right past us and directly to another boat nearby. The best way I could describe it is, “A Parade of Whales”. They could not have done a better job if you had them contracted! This was definitely the highlight of our trip and an experience I will remember and cherish for the rest of my life.
We took a lot of great photos, we told a lot of stories, we had a lot of laughs, made some friends and this all resulted in a wonderful trip with a great group and staff.
If this sounds like an experience you think you would enjoy, please join me next summer when I am scheduled to lead my next Whales, Wildlife and Wilderness—Alaska Photo Tour, June 24-July 3, 2025. See you in Petersburg!
