August 21st – Arctic Sea off the northwest coast of Alaska

It was a day at sea yesterday and our weather angels arrived right on time to clear out the rain from our boarding day. Once again, the captain said he’d never seen it this calm, so he slowed the ship and we all watched whales for several hours (another first for the captain). I should explain that the captain has only done this trip once before, but he said we saw more whales yesterday than were seen on the entire first cruise (which wasn’t hard, because that number was zero). The sunrise was beautiful and the seas were calm all day.

According to the naturalists on board, we saw a total of 4 types of whales during the day and they were pretty excited about the experience. We also passed close to Russia – that photo in the upper-right above is of the two Diomede Islands (the one of the left is in the U.S. and the one of the right is in Russia). We were within about 20 miles of the mainland of Russia later in the day and could see the landmass as clearly as these islands.

We’re just off the northwest coast of Alaska and moving at about 15 miles per hour. We’re told we have 5 days at sea before our first landing.

There’s a little moisture out today so we’ll see if the weather angels take the day off or not. No pressure at this point until we approach land.