Allen Marine Tours

Elite '09

41

285

Andrew C.

Oakland, CA

6/7/2008

We did a combo Whale Watching and Mendenhall Glacier tour. Allen Marine is so confident that you will see a whale that they offer a $100 cash refund if no whales are seen. The guide said that they have never had to make good on that guarantee.

We saw numerous bald eagles, a group of sea lions, and a few harbor seals and true to their word we saw several humpback whales. Unfortunately we learned that humpbacks rarely breach (jump out of the water) in these waters. We were able to get pretty close as they repeatedly surfaced for air spraying water from their blowholes, but I thought it was a little disappointing.

Luckily what made it all worth it was when we came across two pods of Orcas, or Killer Whales. It happened only 10 minutes after a person asked and the naturalist answered that there are Orcas, but they are rarely seen on these tours.

There were at least 20 Orcas with several huge males and a handful of really cute baby Orcas!! The guide said one baby was less than one week old because some of the white spots were still slightly orange. They swam next to our boat for almost 15 minutes, the pods splitting apart and coming together several times. Amazing!!

There was only about 1 1/4 hrs at the Glacier http://www.yelp.com/bi... . I wish they had the tour structured so we had some more time to explore around there.

Definitely the highlight of the entire Alaska trip, though without the Orca sighting I would have rated this a 3+ star tour.

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