I would 
argue that there is little that is more depressing than a rainy sea-day in Alaska. Everything turns monotone and it feels if we are sailing through a particularly lonesome watercolor in which the artist could not decide on anything to put into the image and so left the horizon distressingly blank and great except for the occasional glimpse of distant coastline barely visible through the haze.
Such weather doesn’t bode well for Juneau tomorrow, but then by now we are quite used to rain in Juneau. The constant rattle of raindrops on the windows has become a familiar accompaniment to our days here.
Though the view to either side of us remains clear, the view from the front of the ship is hazed by the rain. No one is really surprised when the ship’s horn starts blasting. Two blasts you assume it’s a fog alert, which is strange because there isn’t really a lot of fog – four blasts you start to wonder if someone is looking to get beached by playing around on the bridge…four more blasts and you realize that there must be something in our direct path. Not a whale, we’re trained and drilled in how to avoid whales and you’re not allowed to attempt to scare them off, plus if it were wildlife of any kind there would have been an announcement from the bridge – this captain is very good about alerting us to those opportunities.
No, this was an entirely different kind of waterbug.
Allow me to explain: when you’re as big a vessel as we are, anything smaller than another cruise ship or freight vessel qualifies as what we call “water bugs”.
In this case, there was a pleasure craft a very, very short distance in front of us (think the nautical equivalent of a car-length? Hard to visualize…let me just put it this way instead TOO DARN CLOSE)…and they weren’t moving. It took about fifteen total blasts on the ship’s horn to finally catch their attention and get them to peel out of the way. How someone could miss an eleven story cruise ship looming behind them doing the nautical equivalent of leaning on their horn at a green light I have no idea…
And what does he do once he finally wises up and gets out of the way? He comes back! To take a picture!!!
Water-bugs…
yeesh