The author (left) and friend on Resurrection Bay

The day before I had cruised the bay on a 150-passenger sightseeing ship. It zipped along at 23 knots, doing an elongated loop into a fjord that dead-ended at the glistening lip of Holgate Glacier. That wall of ancient ice thundered as house-sized chunks cleaved off and crashed into the water. Passengers gleefully shouted at the glacier in a weird attempt to induce even more calving. During the six-hour excursion, cormorants and red-necked phalaropes darted overhead, plump sea lions sunbathed on helipads of exposed rock, and a pod of orcas cavorted in the boat's froth. Splendid sights all, but slightly diminished by the cattle-car viewing conditions. I later learned that the ship I was on had accidentally rammed a humpback whale a few months earlier, leaving me with an additional sour aftertaste.

I hoped that a little low-key kayaking would provide an antidote to assembly-line ecotourism. It did. Skimming around at sea-lion level, I felt sprung from a cage. We were part of the actual sideshow of the bay, not gawkers holding admission tickets. Horned puffins gaped from the nooks of exposed cliff face we paddled under, tucked tight in their holes like letters in post office boxes. Bald eagles lazed overhead, riding the thermals and oozing majesty. (Whenever I saw one in Alaska — and they're as common as crows — my first thought invariably was"What the hell was Benjamin Franklin thinking when he tried to make the turkey our national bird?")

Twigg led us up a side creek that was barely knee deep yet running heavy with red-colored chum salmon. Hundreds of them, hyperkinetic as jumping beans, wiggled beneath us. Their mouths and jaws were grotesquely deformed by the same strange hormonal explosion that propels them ever onward to oblivion. "Dog salmon," they're called. A hint perhaps of what they taste like. Chum are "mouth spawners," which means they don't need to bulk up for a long journey upstream, the result being that there's not much meat on them.

"Once they hit fresh water," Twigg noted, "they're basically living off themselves. They don't have as much fat and muscle fiber." The creek reeked of death while life rolled merrily along out in the open bay

As we headed back at day's end, a lone sea otter did a slow float about thirty feet ahead of us. He was munching clams and we were close enough to hear the crack of shells breaking against his belly. It must be a tiresome existence. Sea otters can't produce blubber. They depend on their thick coats for warmth. To keep the hairs from matting and losing insulation, they stay in constant motion, executing barrel roll after barrel roll.

"Sea otters and kayaks have played a big role in Alaska," Twigg said, as we fought a slight head wind. Our escort kept easy pace, snacking away. "The Russians basically enslaved the natives into catching otters."

Vitus Bering's famous voyage of discovery in 1741 initiated an especially bloody chapter in Alaskan history. Those rich coats that protect the sea otters also make splendid clothing. Europeans developed an insatiable appetite for otter fur, and the Russians cornered the lucrative market with brutal efficiency. Native Aleuts were given the choice of slave labor or death. Subjugation took on the trappings of sport. Russian fur traders were known to line up rows of Aleut men and fire a musket into the first person's head, placing bets on how many skulls the bullet would pass through. (The record was nine.)

Meanwhile, the sea otters were being mercilessly overhunted. In 1804 a single ship bore 15,000 furs back to Russia. By 1911 a fleet of 31 boats scrounged up only a dozen pelts. The sea otter was declared extinct in 1925, then miraculously a mother and pup were discovered six years later. The species gradually recovered. Fur trading is now a memory, but the sea otter remains just as valuable today as a symbol of Alaska's tourism industry. Seward, a still-sleepy town of 3,000, is in the throes of a miniboom. The multimillion dollar Alaska SeaLife Center, a combination museum and marine research facility, is nearing completion on the waterfront. The marina has swelled to 550 slips and now accommodates jumbo cruise ships. There's more traffic on the bay and veteran guides admit it's getting harder to find wildlife.

Move on to Kenai Mild Life

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