Seals and Sea Otters

We did not get picked up like the plan called for.  King Salmons weather is too bad for flying but Aniakchak's weather is perfect for beach walking.  Walking on the beach and looking across the bay on a beautiful clear sky morning.  The bay is surrounded by mountains that were not visible the day before because of all the cloud cover.  It is a breath taking view.  There are islands out in the water.  None of them have names but in the clear sky you can see them.  A lot of things in Alaska were named by the Russians when they came over and started fur trading posts through out the area.  Since the islands had no names we decided that the islands should have Russian sounding names.  So we named one after each of us.  Now there is an island named Andersonoff.

Walking on the beach I saw quite a few harbor seals.  I thought they were cute.  They would swim about 50 yards from shore and pop up and look at you.  As you walked down the beach they sort of followed then popped up to look at you again.  The are gray with black spots and have big black eyes.  None of the other members thought they were cute.  One thought that they were creepy and most of them were afraid of them.  Then I found out why.  These cute creatures that you see in shows and in the circus are meat eating.  The are know to follow swimmers and if they bite, you could die.  Not from the bite itself but from all the bacteria that is found in their mouth.  The bacteria that is passed on to you when bit.  People have been known to die from a seal bite.  Not such cute creatures anymore.  Who knew?  But I still thought it was fun to see them all the same.

Not only were there seals to watch but a nice population of sea otters lived in the bay.  You would see them dive down into the water and come up with a nice size clam.  Then they would float on their back, crack open the clam and start sucking out the meat.  You would see their feet kind of paddling around while the front paws held the clam up to their face.  Then they would drop the shell and head down for another one.  They were very cute and I did not hear any horror stories about them at all.  I was hoping one would come ashore but they basically stayed out in the water just far enough for me to see with binnoculars but not close enough for a decent picture with my camera.