Capturing the Moment

  I really liked how this picture came out. The large circle in the foreground in the mount for a huge Panama gun. It could fire on just about anything that could be seen, out to the horizon in the water. The command bunker behind was where they would do the calculations to figure out where to point the gun. Our hiking group can be seen walking the ridgeline up to the bunker at the top. We made it all the way to our Aleutian Islands! Dutch Harbor, the home of the 'Deadliest Catch' show, was our destination. It took us 10 days to get here, through a lot of unprotected open ocean traveling. We did have a sturdy boat, the Safari Explorer, which is an expedition style ship. But what we really lucked out with was the weather! It was sunny the whole time. It was calm enough to paddle offshore with whales. We had to put sunscreen out on the back table and remind people about bring sunglasses on activities. I just hope that I didn't use up all the good weather for the rest of the s...

Rugged shoreline of Akutan Island. This is a wild part of Alaska that not many people get to see.   We went to check out this rock to see if any rare birds might be nesting on it, but instead, Christian ended up climbing it. Expedition Cruising can take you to some pretty off-the-beaten-path kind of places. We have made it past the Alaskan Peninsula, and out to the Aleutian Islands. Our stop today took us to the very rugged coastline of Akutan Island. Fog hung to the cliffs, which jutted up like turrets of a castle. Birds flew around us and sea lions swam out to check out our small boats. We had planned for kayaking this morning along the cliffs and into the caves, but the offshore winds had other plans. So we shifted to exploring by our small boats in the morning, and then landing in a beautiful valley in the afternoon. The morning skiff tour brought puffins, seal, and sea lion encounters. We even did a short landing to hike up into some of the most beautiful long grass above the ...