We’re overjoyed to advise you that Elyse (our daughter) and Emma (granddaughter) have flown into Juneau to join us for a bit of Alaskan wilderness experience. After three weeks of daily rain – which had us thinking maybe sunshine would be nice – they brought with them a wonderful system of high pressure, dry air, sunlight, and great light for photos.

We started seeing light on the mountains to the west, a good sign.

Local knowledge is a greatly valued commodity, and when Rick Fleishman, a 20-year veteran charter captain, offered some advice on whale watching, we listened intently. That’s Rick’s Catalina 50 docked across from Wind Horse.

Washing your boat down after it has been raining steadily for three weeks says something about the environment. But Rick had a new group of guests coming and wanted everything in Bristol fashion.

One of the prime feeding grounds for humpback whales is Icy Strait, between Admiralty Island on the south and the entrance to Glacier Bay on the north. Rick told us the humpback whales feed on the ebb tide, principally in the area of Point Adolphus.

All of us were excited to see whale spouts as we approached the area.

There appeared to be several groups of whales feeding together, a couple of pairs of rather large males, and then a few loners.

Being yacht designers we are interested in hydrodynamics. This horizontal tail plane looks like a very low drag configuration, rather like the T-tail on Steve’s DG800B glider.

Here is another model tail.

And yet a third refinement.

Everybody was snapping photos. Eight-year-old Emma is becoming quite proficient at catching the action on her own camera.

Here is an interesting comparison for those of you who are camera aficionados. The photo above is shot with an Olympus 720 SW (waterproof to 5 feet and shock resistant). This is on the automatic setting, at highest resolution (5 megapixels). The rest of the photos on this and the next few articles are all shot with a Canon D20, most with a 100mm-to-300mm stabilized zoom lens (the equivalent of a 160-to-480mm 35mm camera lens). The D20 allows full manual control, and its photos are 8 megapixels. However, the biggest difference in quality comes from its manual control, and its ability to select optimum lenses. We’ll talk more about the photo process at a later date.

Once we were about a quarter of a mile off we shut down the engines, turned off the radar and the depth sounder, and just sat, listening to the whales. The whoosh of their exhalations, and the subsequent inhale could be heard over a mile away. Occasionally there would be a very deep resonating "call" which sounded like Tibetan horns.

Towards the end of the feeding cycle whales were surfacing to breathe, then diving all around us. Occasionally one would come by for a closer look. This dude was heading at right angles to our motionless hull.

At the last second he exhaled, as you can see here, and then dove below us, to be followed by a buddy thirty seconds later.

One of the amazing things about this experience is that we were the only boat out here.