Wet and Wild Wednesday

While I was getting ready for my Sky Watch Friday post tomorrow I came across this photo that I took while I was in Alaska back in 2001. I thought that it would be a great pic for my future meme wet and wild Wednesday.

Michelle and I visited Alaska back in 2001 and had perhaps the most memorable trip of our lives. We began the trip by flying into Anchorage and driving, from there, up to Denali National Park. We spent most of our first week traveling through Denali on the park tour bus, you are only able to drive 18 miles into Denali unless you have a permit, to go any further into the park you need to take one of the park buses or walk. After our week up in Denali we spent a day driving down to Seward Alaska where we got aboard a ship for a 7 day cruise through the Inside Passage. Neither Michelle or I was very enamored by the actual cruise however we booked excursions for each day that we were in a port. These excursions where the highlight of the cruise and the one that turned out to be the most exciting was a whale watching tour that we took out of Juneau. Besides for our first glimpse of sea otter we also got our best look at humpback whales. Unlike many of the other whale watches that we had taken before and even ones taken since these whales were up close and person with our boat. We got to see a lot of very interesting whale behavior up close and personal like rolling around in the kelp beds and spy hopping, peaking out of the water to take a look at us as in the picture above.

The best part of the trip though was when one of the whales breached fairly close to our boat. It happened extremely quick, so quick that Michelle only got to see the splash. Fortunately I was facing the right way and got my camera up fast enough to get this quick pic. It may not be the best composition but I was still extremely jazzed that I was able to get a close up breach shot.