More pics - enjoy!

Cruising in the Wildcat.

Deploy the torpedoes!

Exploring the shore.

Dayne overseeing the cooking of the salmon.

The hot springs at Bishop Bay.

Underway.

Eagles get the sloppy seconds.

Here kitty kitty.

Another beautiful day on the boat.

One of many abandoned industry sites along the way.

Sasquatch in town. 

Crab feast coming up. 

Picture infusion

Berg Bay

Alden and I took the wildcat ahead of the big boat to do some fishing. We had zero bites but did manage to get a good long look at a grizzly foraging the mussels along the shore. Unfortunately, all we had to document this was Alden's camera with a wide angle lens (pics to come).

Berg Bay was a place of great feasting and pestilence. We caught 20 crabs in our pots overnight!  

We definitely had a crab feast, eating picnic style in the back.

This is all that remained after the gluttony.

Despite the loveliness of the surroundings and our excellent dining, we could hardly venture out because of the large, biting flies. 

Alden and I managed a kayak outting and Scott, Kim and Dayne took the dinghy out, but it was all done with lots of swatting.

They loved the boat and were somehow amazingly adept at getting past our canvases, they were equally inept at getting out and we finally just sucked them up with the vacuum.

A tiny sample of all our catch.

Bear at Anon Bay

Bear day! Today we visited the Anon Bay Bear Observatory. A very nice boardwalk leads you down a scenic trail, with no shortage of bear droppings, to a very large, well-constructed bear blind/palace.  We spent about an hour waiting, watching eagles and crows and staring into the churning rapids where salmon were valiantly and painstakingly working their way upstream.

Then we got our bear!

He caught a fish in no time. He devoured it equally as fast.

Sweet, slimy, crunchy, gooey fishy.

It didn't take long to finish his snack and he was off before we'd caught our breath.

This eagle wasn't going to turn down a free meal.

Back to the boat and on to the next adventure.

Yes Bay and Meyers Chuck

Here's the crew headed to our next destination with Kim at the wheel. Followed by Dayne at the wheel...

The weather turned nasty near the end and we saw some of our biggest waves yet. We were headed strait into them for awhile, the boat lurching up and down and the bow smashing into troughs and surging up over crests. Lightning lit up the clouds over the mountains around us. The boat felt sturdy and we soldiered on laughing, but when we turned a point and took some waves on the side the boat pitched so quickly we were grabbing for handholds. We were thankful to pull into Yes Bay and find total protection from the waves and watch the tail end of the storm.

The next day we explored Myers Chuck, a cute little community of homes and boats and nothing else.

Fun times. Unfortunately, we lost Scott to the greatly feared giant hairy man-eating spider.

And Alden grew to an incredible size by eating enchanted cookies.

Ketchikan!!! And Misty Fiords!!!

Our first Alaskan town.

Here we picked up Scott and Kim who would be with us for the next week. 

Welcome aboard!!! And thanks for bringing up all that Seattle sunshine!

Alden and I had a nice little run with short shorts the next morning.

After fueling and stocking up we headed to Misty Fiords National Monument. We spent our first night in Punchbowl Cove, tied to a mooring buoy under steep rocky slopes.

In the evening we took the dinghy ashore and had a lively hike up muddy, mossy, rickety boardwalk in bear territory to a beautiful lake.

A great first day for our new crew!

Prince Rupert and Beyond!

Dayne was up first and made us a great breakfast of sausage links, scrambled eggs, freshly baked rolls and coffee. Yummy!

It was a cool and rainy motor to Prince Rupert, but a short trip. This was the first real city we had seen since Nanaimo. We got groceries and ran some errands. We ate out at a great little sushi place, the first time we've been in a restaurant in a month. 

The next day we headed out early, with high water, to make it through Venn Passage, a short but gnarly passage, twisting and full of obstacles and rocks. 

Once out on open water we were surrounded by fog and often couldn't see any land. We had the radar and nav lights on for much of it. The visibility was so low that we saw several small planes flying very low, maybe 200 feet off the water. 

The swell picked up crossing Dixon Entrance and we were only too happy to duck into Foggy Bay, making about 50 miles that day. We celebrated crossing into Alaska with some high fives. Astonishingly, Alaska had put together a welcoming committee, not to be outdone by Canada. As we neared our anchorage for the night two large humpbacks started breaching right in front of us! It was amazing. They got closer and kept up the action, spy hopping, slapping their tales, waving their fins, and launching out of the water to land with a big smack.

Dayne put the engines in neutral and we watched their antics, snapping lots of pictures. It was just the coolest thing. The nature documentaries (and our pictures) don't do justice to such an experience! 

Later in the bay we were greeted by three black bear and a deer foraging on the shores (not together), also some fun tidal rapids in the dinghy. 

Go Alaska!

The Ditch and Bad Currents

We had planned to leave late in order to catch the currents, but our plans were somehow amiss (an error in our tide app, of course). We ended up fighting the currents and making only 6 knots up Grenville channel, also known as "the ditch" for its strait and narrow character. Finally, slack tide came around and we made more headway. We were doing 9 knots around 5pm when we hit some rough water in Arthur Passage. Prince Rupert was our scheduled destination, but it was still 20 nautical miles north. 

We decided to end early, throwing down the hook in Lawson Harbor and making the big crossing through Chatham Sound the next day. 

We had a nice night. We made a big spaghetti dinner and finished off a bottle of whiskey. We made a landing party and rowed to shore to explore the beach.

Alden and Dayne had recently installed an additional inverter. Normally our main inverter runs our electronics and appliances off our battery bank just fine - except everything has an annoying buzz. It makes it hard to enjoy watching anything on the tele and we're usually relieved to turn everything off. This smaller, pure sine wave inverter powers our computer and tv silently. Ahhhh.... We watched a pirated movie and enjoyed the audio immensely. 

The bay was pretty well protected, but a strong wind set up some waves and rocked us to bed. No complaints here!

Hartley Bay and Lowe Inlet

We passed through more beautiful country, hardly ever passing a boat. 

We timed the tides to help us along. This required a short stay over at Hartley bay to wait for currents to help us up the last channel. 

Hartley Bay is mostly a First Nations reservation and a rather odd place. Free government docks provide water and electricity. We dumped our trash, it's not always easy to find places that don't charge for this service. All the roads were actually boardwalks and everyone got around on ATVs and tiny little cars. There was a school, community center and hatchery as well as many homes and seemingly abandoned bicycles. There were no stores of any kind. Locals were friendly but it all seemed bizarre. 

We continued our day of cruising. We were passed by an enormous cruise ship on her way to Alaska. We wondered what their cruise was like. We weren't jealous.

We anchored in Lowe Inlet. A lovely, well protected bay. We put the hook in 40 feet right in front of a small waterfall. The current from the river kept us oriented and prevented us from swinging. Supposedly, it was a great bear watching spot, but the salmon weren't quite up to spawning yet and no bears were patrolling the rapids. 

We grilled a big plate full of our fresh salmon steaks. Best fish I've ever had! We have a freezer full to look forward to.

Hot Springs and Catching a Big One

In the morning Alden and I took off in the dinghy and left Dayne to captain the Jack. 

We sped along ahead of the big boat for several miles, with a rendezvous at Butedale, a very collapsed cannery occupied by Lou and his cat. He invited us into his makeshift home, which had been the dining hall for a small town. He harnesses electricity from a nearby stream, using old machinery from a turbine in the dilapidated powerhouse, a battery bank and old car alternators with salvaged wire from the site. A real show of ingenuity and a marvel of safety hazards.

After getting back on the Jack we continued our journey to Bishop hot springs. 

It should be acknowledged that there are very few anchorages in the area that are very solid. Many beautiful places exist, but the bottom is so deep, with only narrow crescents of shallows along the banks if you're lucky. It can take some real searching and careful positioning to get a holding one feels comfortable with. In this bay two mooring buoys and a small dock help draw travelers to he bay and give them peace of mind. The buoys were taken so we ended up squeezing six boats onto the small dock, rafting up two of the boats. 

The hot springs were great, adorned with marine paraphernalia boasting the names of every boat that had been here before. 

We had quite an evening here. We bought a box of prawns from the neighboring prawn boat and feasted on these with pesto pasta. 

Afterwards, Alden cast his line off the bow of the boat since a couple of the fishermen were casting off the dock, in order to talk them up and get some fishing tips. It paid off, he immediately caught a sea cucumber, followed by a small coastal cod, followed by a big, beautiful salmon. The big guy put up a fight. Instant energy raced through the fishermen as a crowd gathered. Advice flew around, people jumped on the boat and ran around the docks for a better view. They helped net the fish and pull it out of the water. It weighed in at 20 pounds. It was identified as a chinook and quickly eviscerated with many admirers offering their assistance. We were advised on fileting, cooking, storing, reporting... They couldn't believe he'd caught such a great fish right off the dock! We filled 5 large freezer bags and saved two bags of entrails, skin and a big head for crab bait. I couldn't believe how much meat was on that fish.

Everyone was in such great spirits afterwards. The fishermen offered up a feast of crab they'd caught that morning with garlic butter to everyone on the docks. The group of Vietnamese prawners passed around shrimp jerky, then fileted three sea cucumbers and quickly deep fried them with tempura batter. We all tried some, a little on the slimy and chewy side, but not all bad. The fishermen brought out beers and we brought out a bottle of whiskey. It was a full impromptu potlatch with country music. Alden was teased for claiming to be a novice and then promptly catching a whopper. Everyone joined in and drank and talked and ate way more crab than I would have thought possible. The happy spirit of humanity and a shared experience resonated through all of us.

We slept in the next day, enjoying another soak in the hot springs and some soap-on-a-rope before heading out.