Alaska: the last wilderness? part 2

continued from part 1...

Finally we arrived at Alaska, clearing customs in Ketchikan, and the moment that everyone on the boat had been waiting for - the winding journey up the narrow waterways of Wrangell Narrows for the journey to Le Conte Bay for our iceberg encounter. The bergs were much larger than had ever been seen before. Seals on bergs with their pups were everywhere and the blue of the ice glistened in the morning sun.

The contrast between the deep ice blue and the evergreen of the forests that we were passing through left me completely speechless - a difficult feat at the best of times! But it wasn’t just me that was unable to talk, all of a sudden all of the American and French guests had also lost their voices and we all just soaked in the noise from the calving glaciers themselves, watching them crash into the crystal-clear waters beneath us. Bald eagles soared overhead and gulls caught a lazy ride up to the Bay itself.

Mike did an absolutely sterling job in navigating us through the narrowest spaces imaginable right to the hugest glacier some five times longer than the vessel itself so that we could almost touch it, and then we all celebrated with Bucks Fizz before jumping in for an afternoon swim with the bergs themselves. Some took the remaining champagne with them, I took a magazine to read on the ice (photography one, of course), others simply jumped into the ice water with just bikinis on and, needless to say, jumped out again far faster.

Trying to balance on the ice in a drysuit is a knack to be mastered, and everyone kept sliding off the bergs faster than they could get onto them. Only the ones who chose to kayak were safe. This was definitely the icing on the cake to the trip and what everyone had been looking forward to, I couldn’t laugh any harder or my drysuit would have most definitely split! Back onboard and a quick zodiac tour around all the icebergs at sunset ended a spectacular day before heading on up to Icy Strait for some more really cool cold water diving at its best.

Icy Strait is one of the best places to view humpback whales feeding or ‘bubble-netting’, the unusual event when normally solitary animals come together to feed co-operatively, with one male singing to group the fish together and the bubbles being formed to push the fish to the surface with the whales surfacing at the same time with their mouths agape. Unfortunately, I was still a little early to view this when I was there at the end of June, but we did see one particular young male breaching in front of our boat with an almightly ten-tonne splash.

And so we arrived at our final destination, Baranoff Island. Mike had warned us that the diving we were about to experience was even better than Browning Wall and what he truly considered to be North America’s ‘Number One Dive Site’. All around us were a colony of sea otters - these guys are the cutest, lying on their backs having lunch.

Their fur is the thickest in the animal kingdom, I guess it would need to be living in Alaska year-round! They curiously checked us out as we got ready for our final day’s diving at Inian Wall, but quickly disappeared when we entered the water. Descending with my buddy Meryl from California, I quickly realised that Mike was absolutely right - Inian Wall was even more full of colour than I’d ever imagined possible in one place.

Soft pink corals, white corals and deep crimson colours surrounded a nudibranch lover’s paradise. And here the nudibranchs were truly huge. I never thought in my life that I would need a fisheye lens to photograph one, but here the orange peel ones can grow up to one metre! My passion for ocean experiences with big animals, which I have followed around the world for over 11 years, was quickly replaced by these colourful sea slugs and I even turned down a photographic opportunity with a Stellar sealion that was eyeballing me.

This was truly the stuff that underwater dreams were made of. And just when I thought that underwater life couldn’t get any larger, I saw a sunflower star hiding in the kelp. Now these guys are amazing. Not only are they the largest seastar in the entire planet, with up to 26 arms and 150,000 tube feet measuring up to one metre across and five kilos in weight, but they are also the fastest. They can consume virtually any organism in their paths, which almost had me concerned for my camera as I found its foot on the end of my fisheye lens. It was time for me to finish the dive. During the ascent, twirls of burgundy kelp swayed in the sunshine with coloured shells in their midst. Never before had I ever imagined that I would be interested in small stuff. This was a true macro lover’s paradise - and the underwater paparazzi around me confirmed this.

Upon surfacing and waiting for the skiff to pick us up, I almost passed out when I noticed movement in the forest on the other side of the bay. A grizzly bear decided to take a lunchtime stroll along the beach. How many dive sites in the world incorporate the chances of seeing these creatures during a dive? This really is what makes BC and Alaska incredibly spectacular places.

This whole trip wasn’t just cold-water diving at its best in terms of diversity, but it was particularly great for non-diving partners, with a whole host of things to do. The diving is best suited for advanced divers, but even for novices, there are lots of opportunities to experience Mother Nature through kayaking, hiking, whale watching or simply taking in the views while relaxing in the Nautilus’ hot tub. And the crew take special care over newcomers to cold-water diving to make sure they share these breathtaking underwater encounters.

Quite simply it was the best diving of my life. I got over my fear of green water and drysuits as well as finally falling in love with nudibranchs. Blue water diving will never be the same again!

Sport Diver verdict
British Columbia and Alaska offer some of the most spectacular cold-water diving in the world, as well as the chance to see all manner of other wildlife as well.