To Katmai

 Tuesday July 22

Today was another transit day, moving from the Kenai peninsula and Homer to the Katmai peninsula. We spent the morning at Odyssey Lodge. The low tide this morning was 18 feet lower (with probably an extra 100 yards of beach) compared to yesterday’s high tide. We went out onto the mudflats and saw many types of kelp, mussels and scallops on the shore, and near shore we watched small jellyfish and beautiful ochre sea stars. One sea star had only three legs, courtesy of aggressive sea gulls. We also got to watch a sea otter wrap itself up in kelp to safely take a nap without drifting away as the tide changed. We saw several interesting birds, and a colony of harbor seals hauled up onto a small rock. An hour later, nearly that entire landscape had been covered by the incoming tide, and by the time we boarded our water taxi, the water was back up to the cliff edges. The sea otter, however, was in the same spot, safely anchored to his kelp. 

On our short trip back to the Homer Spit, we slowed near a rocky outcrop called “Gull Rock”— there were hundreds of Black-legged Kittiwakes, Glaucous-winged gulls and Common Murre on the rocks, and in the surrounding water there were literally thousands of the Murres in great rafts. 

We flew in 8-passenger Beechcraft airplanes to the airstrip at King Salmon on the Katmai part of the Alaska peninsula, our home for the next two nights. Watching snow capped volcanoes pass by on either side was interesting. The landscape at King Salmon is very flat, a bit of a shock after being in various mountain ranges for the past week. King Salmon Lodge is family operated and the oldest of the salmon fishing lodges in this area. It is rustic but comfortable and the location can’t be beat. Dinner was family style, with freshly caught sockeye salmon— it was incredible.

Pictured: Black Oystercatchers, sea otter with a kelp blanket, juvenile spruce grouse, three-legged ochre sea Star