Thirty two years ago I traveled to Prince William sound to participate in a dive fishery for a herring roe
on kelp fishery about this time of year. A bush pilot who my wife and I hired took us on a joyride after my wife had gotten the pictures she needed for a magazine article she was writing . He took us to the base of Columbia Glacier and throttled up as he put the small plane just above the water / floating ice field. He headed straight into a fissure and we were flying inside the Columbia glacier with ice walls a on either side of the wings. He pulled back on the stick and we exited vertically out of the glacier , did a hammerhead and shot straight back into another fissure. We then exited the glacier back at deck level over the water/ floating ice field.
It wasn't the craziest thing I did during that fishing season but 14 hour dives in 36 degree water are fishing stories. Maybe this all sounds like a fish story . Anyway the Columbia doesn't calf into the sound like it did back in 1984. The Prince William Sound herring fishery has only been a small artisanal effort in the decades after the Valdez hit Bligh Rock in 1986. I read recently a course change to avoid a iceberg field, with origins from Columbia Glacier, was causative in the tankers grounding. The collapse of the herring fishery, the collapse / retreat of the Columbia Glacier, the oil spill and the oil from the North Slope all play interactive parts in this story.