Alaska
30th May 2010, Auke Bay, Juneau, AK, USA
The past week has had us tied up awaiting our friends from Oz, and has given us a break away from our convoy friends.
Touristing
Crossroads and Cloudy Bay who headed up to Skagway, and Serendipity went up north to an obscure little bay to catch some crab, which they did successfully.
The crab are Dungeness and are nice eating as we found after finding one to stumble into our pot at Cannery Cove.
Also Veronika departed SKIE when we arrived in Juneau to do some further exploring on land.
What has surprised us most is the more north we go, the warmer the weather gets, and we are back to our Oz rig of tee shirts and shorts.
I purchased the other day a new plotter/ sounder for the dinghy and am ready to have it installed when Iain arrives. When I think about it the need for the plotter with full US charts is probably way over the top, but you never know if we do some longer trips away from SKIE.
On Sunday we depart for Glacier Bay and have had to get a permit to enter this extremely scenic region which covers a distance of 50 nm. The Glacier Bay National Park covers 4,400 square miles and boasts 20 glaciers, so we will be back to dodging icebergs again like in Tracey Arm.
Our permit is for 5 days and they allow only 25 pleasure craft into the whole region for a maximum of 7 days.
Today Margaret and I are going on a helicopter ride to visit the Mendenhall Glacier close by, and get to ride on a dogsled which will be lot's of fun we expect. Margaret is a dog nut, and we get to spend some time at the puppy nursery.
Dog sledding
Boat still without any troubles, but we had a diver inspect the running gear the other day to reveal we had lost one of our kelp cutters, which is a small blade at the leading edge of the stabiliser fins. I suspect this was caused when we ran over a floating log down in BC, which believe me is not difficult to do as there are millions of them floating around.
We had a great adventure 10 days ago going up Tracey Arm to visit the Sawyer glacier. Many people say this is the best one to see in Alaska, and because there was so much ice from where the glacier calves.
We all piled on SKIE and towed two dinghies to get us close to the glacier. As expected we couldn't get SKIE too close so John Marshall stayed on board and let her drift around in a little inlet with a beautiful waterfall whilst went around the corner to see the might of this monster moving block of ice, when the constant calving brings thunderous noise when thousands of tons break away.
It was a demanding trip up the arm as we weaving in and out of icebergs for most of the trip.
Iceberg floating down Tracey Arm, AK
On our return we got a distressed call from John's wife Debbie who stayed back on Serendipity to look after the three dogs, to announce a wind storm had hit our little anchorage, and up to 50 kt winds had their anchor dragging heady her to the rocks on shore. Debbie started up the engine and kept the boat in position until we arrived about 30 minutes later to find all was well with Serendipity and the other two boats.
I had to drop anchor during this mayhem and felt confident that when our 110 kg Rocna went down that it would grab tight. We kept a watch during the night to make sure no icebergs entered our little bay, but as there is a bar at the entrance, what came in wouldn't be too big. In fact 4 did get in but melted before they would become a real danger by hitting a boat and maybe dislodge an anchor.
Onwards and upwards.
Three clowns and a midget. Midget in the foreground.
