Bergs and whales

Today we headed to St Anthony for a boat tour. We expected to see icebergs and maybe a whale. We saw great examples of both.

Our tour boat today

Limited room up on top

 

We considered finding this stairway trail up to the communication tower later, but decided against it:

HaHa wonder why we decided against the climb? 435 steps!

This berg was grounded, so we got pretty close in the boat. Fairly unusual shape apparently, really pretty:

 

Same berg, different angle:

We had some amazing whale sightings from the boat too. Unfortunately we weren't able to capture them in pictures. A humpback whale entertained us by chasing its quarry right up on to the rocky shore a couple of times. Once it breeched (sp?), spectacular. Cath saw most of it, right out of the water before the huge splashdown. I saw the ripples.

Apparently the transient whales are about 50 miles offshore right now, and will be following the capling in to this immediate area over the next few days.

Later on we drove to a cove where a couple more bergs were beached. We ate our lunch in the little kiosk you can see here, just watching:

One of the bergs was shark-like (maybe a camel shark, with its two humps):

While we were there, the large front fell off with a crash and a splash:

Shortly after that, the berg rolled over about 90 degrees:

We watched the bergs for quite a while. Even saw another whale hunting nearby. We saw just the back of it periodically this time, as it came up for air.

 

Here's a 2 minute video of the berg rollover:

 

Later again, we drove to a place we could see the same grounded berg  we saw from the boat this morning, from a different angle. It was a bit of a hike but worth it. On the way to the hike we stopped and bought 2 lemonades from a stand run by a couple of little girls. We had to give   the cups back though! As we were leaving we saw them running into    the house all excited to tell Mom about their big sale.                                                                                                                    

We sat and watched it for quite a while. It was a beautiful spot, and we heard a loud Crack once, so stayed longer in case it was going to calve. It didn't while we were there, but we'll be heading back there today to see what happened overnight.

On the way back home we stopped at a little restaurant we had noticed on the way, and both had one of their lobster special dinners. Excellent!