Cruise Day 4 - Anchorage

 

Today proved to have a bit more excitement than was planned. But it started with beautiful sunrise.

We enjoyed sailing up the Cook Inlet with very smooth waters. We passed the downtown while the sun was still low so the lighting was not great.  But this enabled me to get a rare picture of Anchorage from the water!  Only HAL visits this port, about once a month. Due to the high tides in the Cook Inlet, the ships have to carefully time their passage.

Mary and I took an early shuttle into town and enjoyed walking around and shopping.  Due to the low tide, we had to be back on board by 1:00 pm or would not be able to  return until after 3:00 pm.  So we planned our visit carefully.  I enjoyed a reindeer sausage for lunch, and then we took a shuttle back to the ship and arrived by 12:30.  

Speaking of the tides, the captain reported that we experienced a massive 31' tide today! When we left in the morning from Deck 3, we walked down a ramp to a platform 6' off the ground, then another ramp to the ground as shown on the left picture. 

At the lowest point, the gangway had to be pulled back from the ship for nearly 2 hours, and the gangway ended up being even with the deck 4 lifeboats as you can see in the right hand picture. 

After they opened the gangway at 3:20,  the gangway was laying flat into deck 2.  As you can tell, I loved watching all this take place.  They had to close and move the gangway several times as the ship moved up and down relative to the fixed dock.

We ate in the buffet once again tonight, then enjoyed the violin and piano duet, playing songs from a modern Norwegian composer. 

So that's our rather exciting day in Anchorage.  We have a sea day tomorrow as we head to Valdez.