Sitka, or How I Fell in Love with Sea Otters and Decided to Move to Alaska

(July 5) – Have I mentioned that I’ve fallen in love with Alaska? As I write this, we are leaving Sitka, a glorious town on its own little archipelago. The town itself is on Baranof Island, but all around it are other small islands, some just large enough for a single home, some a bit larger and many uninhabited by people.

As we approached our anchorage this morning, we saw the charming little town with its historic buildings spread along the shore. Its Russian heritage is quickly visible in the onion dome of St. Michael’s Russian Orthodox Church in the center of town. Unlike previous ports on this cruise, Sitka does not dock ships of our size, so we anchored a short distance from their pier. The ship’s tenders provide transportation to and from the pier.

We had an early excursion billed as a Sea Otter and Wildlife Quest. The excursion boat, a big comfortable catamaran, picked us up from the ship and we headed out into the sound. Both the captain and the tour guide on board offered commentary as we motored south along the shore of Baranof Island and in and out of the smaller islands nearby. Both these spokespeople were wonderfully knowledgeable and adept at both spotting and explaining what we were there to see.

We left the Inside Passage overnight to come to Sitka, so Sitka Sound opens into the Pacific Ocean unlike the places we’ve visited up till now which were all protected from the ocean. This allows lots of wildlife to come in easily from the ocean. It also makes for bigger waves. Some of the folks on our boat were looking a bit woozy at times. Fortunately, neither Mike nor I have trouble with motion sickness.

Before we had gone very far, we saw a group of female sea otters, happily floating on the surface in a kelp bed. They use the kelp to anchor themselves. Many of these girls had babies on their bellies. That’s where the babies live for their first few months of life. Sea otters are among the cutest mammals with their sweet faces full of whiskers and their front flippers tucked onto their chests and back flippers sticking straight up.

While our captain was careful not to get too close too quickly, he was truly skillful at getting us close enough to see these amazing mammals with binoculars and even with just our eyes sometimes. He also managed to “spin” the boat each time we saw something so that folks on both sides could see. As it was raining, our deckhand went around the outside of the windows more than once to squeegee the windows to improve visibility. These folks are true professionals!

We saw some steller sea lions at a distance, again looking like those we saw during our photo excursion in Juneau. It’s a bit like seeing overweight, pink naked ladies lounging on the rocks.

We found a group of harbor seals in a pile on another rock. This group was gray in color, but rounded with blubber and looking for all the world as if they were on the beach in Miami. There was no sun, of course, as this was an overcast and rainy day. We were told that they get on the rocks when the tide is flowing over the surface, and then the seals are left on the rocks when the tide goes out. When the water rises again, the seals float off. Despite their size (and they are enormous), they are very swift and agile when swimming.

What we learned as the boat moved to another area was that the females travel together and the males travel with other males. Apparently once a year, for a brief period, the males and females find each other, romance blooms (or what passes for romance with sea otters) and they mate. Other than that, it’s not a co-ed lifestyle.

Thus when we found the next group, they were all males, some showing the whiter faces that indicate they are the elder otters. We watched a couple of smaller, perhaps younger males as they dove over and around one another and lunged at each other, seeming to play together.

Since we’re still in the rainforest that extends up this coast from Oregon to Alaska, the islands are densely wooded with the mix of Sitka spruce and Western Hemlock that we’ve seen elsewhere, The landscape provides a rich habitat for brown bear (not that we’ve seen one yet), bald eagles, black-tailed deer and other wildlife.

There are bald eagles all around and on one small island we were treated to the sight of an eagle’s nest. Though we didn’t see the parents, an eaglet popped its head up occasionally, drawing oohs and aahs from the crowd. The word from the naturalists is that only 40 percent of the young ones survive to adulthood; many deaths occur when the young ones make their first attempt at flight.

Per our commentator, there are 100,000 bald eagles in North America today. Of those, 75,000 are in Alaska. Those statistics seem believable to us as we’ve seen so many of them all along our way. Once on the endangered list, they are now a vibrant population and no matter how many I see, I’m thrilled each time.

Along the beach on one island, we saw two black-tailed deer. They are much smaller than the whitetails we see at Lake Lure. Once again we were lucky because they didn’t immediately run back into the forest, but tolerated our boat coming relatively close to the beach so that we could see and photograph them.

The hope we would see whales was more than realized. A gray whale surfaced not far from the boat and as we watched it came up again and again, once very close to the side of the boat. It was so close that its barnacles were clearly visible.

Soon we spotted a humpback whale in the bay nearby. We tracked along near it for awhile as it dove and surfaced close to the shore. Because the mountains here are so steep, as that slope extends beneath the water, the area along the shore is immediately deep rather than deepening gradually.

We spent a truly exciting three hours on the boat, enjoying the opportunity to see both the beauty of islands and water and the great wildlife. We’re not only seeing a lot, but learning so much that we didn’t know with the help of good guides. Did you know, for instance, that the sea otter’s fur is so thick that you can attempt to find the skin on its pelt but won’t be able to move the hair aside to see skin? We had a piece of otter pelt on board to test this for ourselves.

We also learned that sea otters have a sort of pocket in the fur under one arm where they keep a stone to use to crack open shells to eat the meat inside. They choose and keep one stone in that pocket, pulling it out to use as needed. As comical as their behavior can seem, they are pretty intelligent creatures, these sea otters.

The tour boat dropped us off at the pier in town and we wandered around a bit, making sure to step into little St. Michael’s Church. Built in the mid-1800’s, it was destroyed by a fire in 1996. It was rebuilt with the original plans and is open to visitors. Some of the icons and relics were rescued from the fire and are displayed in all their golden splendor. Many of the buildings in Sitka are on the National Register and a very sweet Tlingit lady at the church told me that the entire town was named an historic town, the only town on our west coast to be so designated.

We are now back out in the open ocean, sailing north up the coast. There’s a pretty thick fog, so there’s not much to see outside right now but the water. We’re rolling more out here than we’ve done in more protected waters and it’s a bit like being rocked, so we should sleep well tonight. We’ll sail overnight and spend part of tomorrow sailing in sight of the Hubbard Glacier. It will be our last full day on the ship. It’s hard to believe that we’ve been aboard almost a week and seen so much of this amazing state.

One thing is sure. We want to come back and will make sure we do. We still have a few days after we disembark in Seward Wednesday morning to explore the Kenai Peninsula and Anchorage, so there’s more to come.

Oh, about me moving to Alaska—I don’t really plan to move, but would seriously consider coming to live for a month just to have the opportunity to explore more.
[Photos by Mike Lumpkin]