Second port - Sitka

Sunday's port of call was Sitka. We did a little shopping a d met this bear before getting on our biat excursion.

The boat was named the Tatiana and since that's the name of one of L's friends, I had to get a picture for her.

One of the first wildlife sightings was this bald eagle.

This is an eagle's nest and if tou look closely, there's an eaglet in there.

This was a whole group of sea otters, pretty hard to see and photograph.

The guide passed around this sample of otter fur. He said their fur has 1,000 hairs per square inch.

There were so many fishing boats out, all fishing for salmon. We probably saw more than 60 professional fishing boats all in about the same area.

Once the fog and clouds cleared we could see the mountains around Sitka. We also saw sea lions, humpback whales and salmon jumping out of the water.

Drinks were included on the boat so I took the opportunity to try an Alaskan red amber, made in Juneau. I liked it.

The excursion dropped us off in downtown Sitka where we did more shopping. This food truck was serving reindeer sausage which I did not try.

So much salmon - everywhere. We had to take a free shuttle back to the ship as we were pretty far from the pier. We were told they can dock six cruise ships at a time.

I bought a Sitka sweatshirt (mostly because I liked the color), an Alaska Christmas ornament and a meat stick with 2 percent reindeer meat that I plan to give to B.

Back on board we unexpectedly met up with our Houston friends and a other guy (a trivia master) and won with a perfect 30/30 score. A lot of the questions were the same ones from the other day so we did have a bit of an advantage. We won free drink tickets ... again! We played a round of music trivia with them too, but didn't fare as well.

Here's the winning team!

Cindy and I went with E and D to the Italian restaurant on board. It was D's 29th birthday so they brought him a special dessert with a fake candle. Apparently there are no real candles allowed on the ship.