4 Wheels 4 Girls

July 9th, we were on the boat trip that we had started a few hours ago. Lots of people were sick, so I went on the top deck where there weren’t many.

I was just sitting there peacefully when suddenly, the ranger, Amber, said there was a humpback whale! I rushed over to the port side of the boat and saw the fins of one– two! whales! I watched the fins go under and the tails flip out with sprays of water flicking around. Dad said that when you can see their tails come out of the water, that means that they are diving deep. I watched and waited for them to come back up and suddenly something shot out of the water and did a 180 through the air. It was AMAZING! Amber said that when the whales pop out of the water and spin like that, it is called breaching. We saw the tail go up again and I wondered if it was going to breach again. So I kept my eyes peeled until– whoa! It breached again! I can’t even describe how it made me feel. The only thing was that it was completely magical. And it felt even more magical when Amber said that it was extremely rare for the boat tour to see a breaching whale. But I can’t describe what I saw, so Ellie drew a picture of it.

Ellie's drawing of the breaching whale

It was so wonderful that I didn’t want to l leave, even when the whales were long gone. But eventually, we headed on.

Can you see the other boat below Holgate Glacier to the left? That is another big boat and is about a half-mile away from the glacier.

At the half point of the boat tour, we arrived at the Holgate Glacier. It was cooler than any glacier I’d seen before, which, surprisingly, was a lot. We were really close, and as we approached, there were millions of mini icebergs. As we cut along through the icy water, I could hear the chunks bobble and crunch and smash against the boat. Finally, when I thought that if we kept going we’d hit the glacier, we stopped. Suddenly, a huge chunk of ice broke loose from the glacier. Greta said that it sounded like a mix of thunder and 2,000 elephants stampeding down a hollow sheet of metal.

We had a great time on the boat tour.

Riding away from Holgate Glacier