We saw lots of whales on our last two cruises to Alaska. Strangely enough, the first sighting came just about an hour after we sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a lone whale, but too distant to identify the species. In 2004, we spotted numerous Orcas off the British Columbia coast. This year, most of the whales we saw came during a whale-watching expedition aboard a small boat that sailed about an hour west of Juneau. The boat's course also took us past an island jam-packed with Steller sea lions.

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