On Thursday I had the pleasure of spending the afternoon with Rotarian Timothy Massawe from the Moshi Rotary Club in Tanzania.  Our club is working with his to support a group of girls attending school.  We do regular zooms with the girls and get copies of their report cards. Timothy is a defense attorney by profession and earlier he visited with our former public defender.  After his meeting we went out with Captain Gary on the Morning Glory to look for wildlife.

Timothy has plenty of wildlife where he lives, lions, hippos, elephants, but he was interested in seeing whales.  We sailed out of Sitka on a beautiful day.

And we ran into sea lions just yards from Crescent Harbor. 

We sailed further west, into a fog bank. Gary has electronic charts, GPS and radar that shows other boats on the chart. There were a lot of trollers.  We soon found some humpback whales, a mother and calf, and another independent whale. Gary cut the engines and we rocked gently in the long two-foot swells and one of the whales came very close to us.

We sailed further into the fog and found a raft of sea otters intertwined in a kelp bed being watched over by sea birds on the nearby rocks.

Further into the fog we got to St. Lazaria Island.  A volcanic island that is part of a national wildlife refuge.  It is the rookery for hundreds of thousands of birds.  The island sat on the edge of a sucker hole, and I was able to watch a group of puffins fishing.

I shot the island through layers of fog and mist.  It was a strange and beautiful day. 

After a couple of hours, we sailed back through the fog toward Sitka and watched the Seiner Cloud Nine pull in a big set of salmon.

When we were done with the cruise, I took Timothy out to Starrigavan to look at the salmon and perhaps catch sight of a bear fishing. We saw lots of salmon from the footbridge but no bears until we got off the bridge and were crossing the Nelson logging road to my car.  A bear popped out of the woods. I grabbed for my camera but the bear thought “ops, people” and turned around and headed into the brush and the woods.  All I got was a picture of the bushes, not worth posting.