18 February--Last Night Kept on Giving

This Adelie seemed to put up with a lot of folks invading its space.

I went down to Hut Point again in the evening and things were even better than they had been that morning.  From the hill with the Vince Cross, people had been seeing 6 or 7 Orcas cruising around the Sound.  There were several Adelies shivering as they molted.  The near shore area was getting  coated with ice underwater, giving the area a tropical paradise azure blue hue.  Surrealy blue. There were also blocks of sea ice that had been thrown up on the shore and then coated with layers of glare ice.  The shore itself was coated with layers of the same white ice, but the layers were arranged to make it look like the layers of travertine like in Havasu Canyon of the Grand Canyon.  But the highlight was when a Weddell seal hauled up about 25 feet away from us.  It gallumphed across the "travertine" ice and the coated blocks over to its mate.  I got several great pictures of it, but they got "lost" somehow in transferring from the memory card to my laptop.  I've asked a friend of a friend to try to retrieve them, but they're not here for you to peruse.  Looks back in a few days and it might be here.  Devastating!
Note: through the generosity of Blake Holt, I have 3 photos of that seal hauling out.  They're at the very end of this post.  Thanks, Blake!

Adelies seem to have a certain similarity to moles and voles.

A Weddell seal over by the Ice Pier.

These are the images Blake let me use from that Weddell seal hauling out near us.

I went back to Hut Point last night, hoping that the seal had a schedule that it adhered to.  I was able to see several seals, but they never hauled out while I was there.