I like barnacles.

The way they look so inviolate, so hard and dead and solid. Then I noticed if you touch them in the centre there's a slight softness there, a little give. They flinch slightly and curl inward. After that I couldn't stop touching them, giving a little poke and watching for the contraction.

Notes from Glacier Bay:

Late night on the catamaran the full moon rose in the last dusky dusk and orca fins cut the ocean blackly.

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More lovely sea otters curious and mobile. Porpoise. I always think of Lewis Carroll: "With what porpoise?"

One dead floating sea otter sad still feet. Tonight at dinner seven river otters ran down to the ocean, changed their mind(s), ran back into the alders, then after a few minutes emerged again, only six brave (foolish?) enough to make it to the water, one chickening out.

Tonight a humpback is feeding close in this small bay, surfacing, humping, going down in small fluke-lifting dives. And a seal saw me off to bed.

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Hummingbird alighting on a branch above my head. Salmon swarming roiling the surface of the bay. That harbour seal gray-spotted. Puffins with orange eyebrows. White butts of diving murrelets; better underwater, their flight is comical: they bounce, touch down bellies on their way into the air.

Black and white murres. Oystercatchers orange beach bill. Kittiwakes. Songbirds thrilling trilling. Sea lice suckers onboard the pink salmon Ken caught.

Sea lions humping and bumping into the water then surging forward boiling the water like eels in a pot, like hattifatteners towards obtuse encroaching paddlers.

Half-moon arc of porpoise. The sea is so calm now. The sun is umber, ochre. Waiting for the watery breath of a whale. The rusty squeak of a bald eagle. Sea lions from afar sound like bullfrogs, like distant thunder. From up close, like Tyrannosaurus Rex.

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Here in Glacier Bay the air is thick, everything is alive, the sea breathes a great sucking wet breath every twelve hours.

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On July 10 we wake to fog damp drops hovering. But later it lifts then clears in Adams Inlet a herd of seals bobbing eyes so deep and watchful. Porpoises humping arcs and a mother moose and two long-legged calves.

Tonight at McBride Glacier it's all heaving and grinding ice, oystercatcher alarm calls, terns squeaking and then a humpback puffs by, wolves mourning as we eat our rice.

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Here the birds fly underwater and the fish fling themselves skyward.