Working for a small, independent company means that a lot of us will cram 12 months’ worth of work into 5 – most of us will work 70-80 hours a week for five months, May through September; at the end of September the cruise ships stop coming and life comes to a screeching halt. Some…
The thing about whale watching is the scale; I don’t know how many people I’ve had tell me “oh, we’ll see whales from the ship” when it’s completely not the same thing. People go to the IMAX because with the right movie, it’s a larger-than-life experience. Same with whale watching: seeing one from a 1000…
A lot of people come to Alaska specifically to see the whales, but they’ve already booked cruises during the shoulder seasons of early May or late September; those cruises are cheaper and with fewer passengers, but the weather is more likely to be bad and the whales are almost certainly not going to be as…
You’ve decided to go whale watching! How does this work? Well, check your schedule! Make sure to give yourself 30-60 minutes after your ship docks, and DO NOT WORRY about what the whales will be doing! Cetaceans have awesome brains that allow them to sleep with half of their brain, while the other half is still feeding and surfacing. Because of that, there’s no “best time of day” to see whales. Now, let’s check the weather – this is a temperate rainforest, and we get about 200 inches of precipitation every year. We TOTALLY still go if it’s raining! If it’s windy, though, that’s another story – but even then, it might not be windy out on the water! So let us worry about the weather, which we’re obsessed with anyway, and you just make sure you have warm, water-resistant…