03 July 2015; Glacier Bay, Alaska.

It is not always easy to get on line if the ship sails between mountain ranges. Yesterday we were in Skagway and we docked at the Railroad Dock. Which is a great dock, preferred by all Captains, as it is nicely in the shelter from the prevailing winds. Problem is those mountains also “shelter” the ship from any Satellite connection a lot of times.

For the coming days we will not have this issue as we will be more in open waters. Although Glacier Bay in an inside fjord, the mountain ranges slope towards the water which means there is nearly always a satellite in a direct sight line to catch the electronic traffic going in and out of the ship.  As we have no option to hook up to a regular telephone line we have to rely on satellites, which is not always the cheapest or the most satisfactory connection.  But in order to get a connection at all there is a lot of expensive equipment involved.

Not everybody realizes that communication with a ship is not as simple as with a land line or with a cell phone which hooks up with every cell phone mast in the area. Quite often we do not have a cell phone mast nearby; most of the time we are our own cellphone mast. That means that an electronic signal sent from a computer on board, first has to go up 30 miles in the sky to catch a satellite. Then that satellite has to send the signal 30 miles down again to the receiving station. Then the signal is forwarded to the company server (More or less in the same way as at home where a signal goes from your computer to a modem or router and back again). Then the signal goes to the server where the webpage is kept that you want to access. A response has to travel the same way back. So if you are surfing on line or connecting to a specific website, there is this constant Ping-Pong to and fro via this whole extended route. That takes time and if there is a mountain partly in the way it goes even slower. It makes our on board internet seem slow at times and there is nothing we can do about it; even if each ship had a satellite which would hang directly over the ship all the time and followed it foot by foot. The distances to travel remains the same.

I do not think that many people were on the computer today as it was a glorious day in Glacier Bay. It was rainy at the lower bay where we picked up the National Park Rangers but as soon as we travelled up the Bay the clouds broke and it was nice and sunny. To my amazement there was very little ice in front of the Glaciers. The Glaciers had not been very active. The down side of this is that there was very little to no calving; the plus side was that the Captain could bring the ship very close everywhere as there were no ice cubes to hamper a safe progress.

With no ice in the way you can sail close enough for these sort of details. (Photo Courtesy HAL Library) Nearly every Glacier has a river under it. A tunnel which drains off the melting water from the underside of the Glacier. On low tide this river is clearly visible.

We stayed in the Bay from 07.00 hrs. until 17.00 hrs.  The whole time the Rangers are on board.  Some of them live all year around at the Ranger Station at Bartlett Cove but quite a few of them come only for the summer season to ride the cruise ships and to provide narrations and a scientific context to our day of sightseeing. Some then return to University but others divide time between two National Parks. In the not so distant past we had one ranger who we called “Mr. Whale” among ourselves. Not that he looked like one but because he seemed to follow the yearly migratory route of the whales. In the winter he was in Hawaii and in the summer he was in Alaska. His dream was  one day to get funding for a boat to follow the whales on their complete year around cycle. When we asked him if his girlfriend would not get lonely then, he looked quite perplexed; it was a given for him that she shared the same passion for the whales and would be on the same boat.

Tomorrow we will spend the day crossing the Gulf of Alaska. The weather looks quite good and thus our guests will have a nice day to finish their cruise. Most of them are going home as far as I understand but a fair few are travelling inland to see Denali park.