Wild Alaska

“hey, you guys need a lift?” Standing outside Valdez Airport with our pile of dive and photographic gear, and no means of transport in sight, this offer from a friendly stranger named Jeff, who worked at the airport, was music to our ears.

We had just arrived after a cross-country flight, so this was the very start of our Alaska dive adventure.

The unsolicited offer to drive us to town was emblematic of the friendliness and willingness to help that we would encounter throughout our time here.

Our dive expedition began in earnest the next morning, after a restful night in a waterfront hotel. We loaded our gear, boarded a transport boat and set out from Valdez Harbour to Fidalgo Bay, three to four hours away.

Our objective for the trip was to experience Alaska’s underwater world, immerse ourselves in the wilderness and possibly find salmon sharks in the waters of Prince William Sound.

However, before we had even arrived at Ravencroft Lodge, our base of operations for the week, we found ourselves in the ice-choked waters near the Columbia Glacier.

Icebergs, both small and large, and of varying shapes, sizes and colours, bobbed in the cold waters. Unlike other Arctic regions, where groups of seals can be seen hauling out on the icebergs, here we were treated to the site of dozens of otters relaxing on their tops. The urge to snorkel the icebergs became irresistible!

Our journey to the lodge continued, with sightings of bald eagles, stellar sea-lions and false killer whales keeping us and our cameras busy. Eventually we arrived at the well-appointed wilderness lodge, and our attention turned to the dives ahead.

The waters of Fidalgo Bay are somewhat sheltered between two strips of land and some towering mountains, but they are open to the exposed stretches of Prince William Sound, and can turn rough quickly.

We were fortunate that, during our time in the area, the seas were calm.

Our first dive was directly in front of the lodge, and we were immediately intrigued. A lush garden of seagrass was home to beautifully adorned opalescent nudibranchs, small jellies, assorted crabs and a variety of starfish, while further out in somewhat deeper water we found brilliantly coloured starfish and foot-long sea cucumbers wandering a bed of bull kelp.

One of the divers in the group located an oxymoronic small giant Pacific octopus hiding in a rocky lair.

We didn’t see this individual, but we would come across one on our last dive of the expedition.

back in the seagrass, we located an old abandoned ore cart, a relic from the past history of copper-mining in the area. Ravencroft Lodge is built on a former mining site and, in addition to this submerged cart, there are artefacts scattered about the grounds of the lodge.

A short hike into the forest will take visitors to the site of the original mine. Mining for copper occurred in the early parts of the 20th century before being abandoned due to a drop in copper prices.

Before setting our sights on deeper dive-sites, we took advantage of favourable tides to explore a glacier-fed river in which salmon begin their migration from the sea upstream to their preferred spawning grounds deeper into the forests. Here, in only 1.5m depth, we battled the fierce rush of tumbling 8°C water to remain still and photograph hundreds of chum and pink salmon, as they raced by in a desperate push to pass through fallen trees, waterfalls and rocks and continue their journey upstream.

Some would dart past us at a frenzied pace, while others could be found resting in the eddies and pools, as if to catch their breath before making another push upstream. By the time we hiked back to our skiffs we were all exhausted, excited and gratified to have witnessed one of nature’s miracles.

Dawn comes early to Alaska in the summer months, and the next day we were awake way before breakfast, eagerly anticipating our first search for the mysterious salmon shark.

As we fiddled with our cameras and assembled our gear, we went over the details of what conditions we would be looking for, and how to dive with the skittish sharks.

According to the experts at Ravencroft, we needed flat-calm water to spot the small dorsal fin slicing through the surface. Once spotted, we needed to find a “player”. This is a shark that’s interested in feeding and not too skittish as to be unapproachable.

It can take some time, we were told, and indeed it did. In fact, after several hours of looking, we had found none.

This pattern would repeat over the next few days. We did see one individual on the surface, but we were never able to get into the water with one.

Nature is not predictable: an unusually cold summer could be why we failed to find salmon sharks during our visit.

Theories as to why salmon sharks frequent these waters and linger on the surface for the summer months focus on water temperature. Warm-blooded, they might be rising from deeper, colder water to bask in the warmer surface layers of the sea. The season for spotting them is short, only a few weeks across the months of June and July.

Our quest will continue on a future trip, in the hope of finally capturing photographs of this elusive creature!

After our search for sharks, we decided to dive some rocky outcroppings nearby.

At a site known as the Magic Garden, we found carpets of huge plumose and metridium anemones adorning the boulders. In addition, we photographed black rockfish and other species of Alaskan bottom fish.

The dive-sites here generally consist of a rocky sloping terrain until about 20-25m depth, when they typically drop off on a vertical wall to 180m or more.