We’ve made another calendar for sale this year, featuring some of our favorite images we captured of wild animals in Alaska. Bears, whales, moose, an adorable sea otter, a baby seal on an ice floe, and Arctic critters like muskox and snowy owls. We hope you enjoy it! It’s for sale here: http://www.lulu.com/shop/seth-ellen-leonard/wildlife-of-alaska/calendar/product-24260768.html
Whale breaching near Glacier Bay, Alaska – the cover photo of our new calendar. Copyright Ellen and Seth Leonard.
Desert hills and white horses! Fun, fast sailing off the Baja coast
We had a wonderful time cruising down the west coast of Baja – it’s a beautiful, wild place, and it was especially interesting and unique for us as it was the first time we have sailed off a hot desert coast. (Much of the Arctic is a desert, of course, but it’s very different from the red hills of Baja!) It made quite the change from the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest that we’d grown so used to over the last few years!
Maybe my favorite bird? A Least Auklet! (he’s tiny – only 6 inches!)
Another bird-nerd critter post! Both Seth and I have soft spots for goofy-looking birds and they don’t get much goofier than auklets. On our sail to the Arctic in 2015, we spent several days on St Paul island in the central Bering Sea, binoculars and cameras trained on cliffs full of nesting auklets. It was a toss-up for my favorite, but the Least Auklet was certainly a contender. Continue reading
All my critter posts so far have focused on mammals, but we see so many interesting birds while sailing that I thought it was time for an avian critter post. Two years ago, on the Alaskan North Slope, we were lucky enough to see a snowy owl. We watched him for hours as he swept low over the tundra and perched on whalebones. Since it was summer in the Arctic, he was hunting in full daylight (even though it was close on midnight), and the low angle of the sun made for lovely light for photography. Continue reading
The last few (belated) posts have been about work on Celeste over the 2016/17 winter. It was a bit of a tough winter for living aboard – the harbor froze over, it was unusually cold and snowy for the Pacific NW, and the short days were a bit depressing at times – but we made some great friends and, being amateur bird nerds, we really enjoyed all the wintering avian visitors – harlequin ducks, long-tailed ducks (“oldsquaws”) in their winter plumage, American widgeons, buffleheads, common goldeneyes, and hooded mergansers. Here are a few pictures we took on one glorious sunny day in January:
American Widgeons:
American widgeons with Mt Rainer in the distance
In our last post we mentioned that we were back on board Celeste in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands! So here’s what we’ve been up to!
Bering Sea fishing boats moored near Celeste
Hi everyone,
We’ve been doing a little renovation to Gone Floatabout and added some new pages. Finally the Arctic Voyage tab now has a full account of the voyage, from our first shakedown cruise in British Columbia in 2013 to our rounding of Point Barrow and return to the Aleutians this past summer. If you’re really ambitious and or really bored, all the posts are in order now on the 2014: Alaska page and the 2015: Arctic page 🙂
Much more exciting is that we finally did something about the Photography page! It’s now under the new Media tab and has three extensive galleries: Wildlife, Nature, and Adventure & People. We had a lot of fun putting that together, so hope you enjoy it!
Finally, sorry for the last post that got sent out – it was a snafu that happened when we were editing our home page.
Hope everyone enjoys floating about the revamped site 🙂
Cheers,
Ellen & Seth
