August 25th

Greetings:

While August isn't over yet, I thought I'd post what we've done since the last post late July.

The most unusual thing about S.E. Alaska this year is how warm it has been. Now many of you will laugh, keep in mind everything is relative as to temperatures, depending on where you live. This summer we have had very little rain, and temperatures have frequently been in the upper 70's to low 80's. Everyone has been talking about how unusual this is, and it is. There has also been much less rain than normal. Now normal temps are highs in the low 60's and lots of rain! So 60's vs. 80's is the extreme that we aren't complaining about, but are just unusual. As I write this though the temps have now fallen back to normal, and rain has been the norm rather than the exception. Fall is here in S.E.!!

We left Ketchikan again and headed north from here. Our first stop that first day was in Meyers Chuck.  As of the census of 2000, there were 21 people, 9 households, and 7 families residing. But, there is a very nice dock here and believe it or not a U.S. Post Office too! The lady that runs the post office will, upon a phone call to order, deliver sticky buns (cinnamon rolls) to your boat the next morning. Not on our diet, but quite good. Here are a couple pictures from here.

                                          Meyers Chuck Dock

                                                    Meyers Chuck phone booth, note moss on top and the can for
                                                    talking. Must have worked at one time.

The other highlight of being here two nights as we were able to catch two nice Coho Salmon. Nothing quite like fresh salmon. Chuck is starting to become a fisherman. There is actually quite a lot to learning how to fish for salmon. It is interesting. Last, we had a wonderful sunset here.

Wrangell has a population of about 2,300 and its main industry is fishing, tourism, and logging. It is a very SMALL town, but very friendly!

Next we moved to Petersburg. Petersburg population is about 2,800 and the Scandinavian people populated this town. Their influence is quite obvious when visiting. We really like it here as the people are quite nice! There are several huge fish cannery operations here and pleasure boats like ours are the exception on the docks. Most of the fishing boats are quite well maintained. This year has been a record haul for salmon, so much so the canneries had to restrict the fisherman as to how much they can drop there. The story on the dock was that deckhands of the fish boats, mostly college kids, would be making $100,000 each for basically three months of work. If you are good at commercial fishing the money is quite good. Hard work though.

                                          Downtown Petersburg.

                                          Beautiful flowers at a Petersburg home.
Petersburg was just voted as the number one most desirable city in Alaska to live in with a population greater than 2000 people.

After four days here we decided to head back to Ketchikan and had a pleasant journey back "home".

We will be departing Ketchikan heading into British Columbia Canada no later than around September 7th or so. We have to get south as the weather is changing rapidly and in  order to not encounter rough waters, it is, sadly, time to go. We should be home by October 1st or so. Of course we are looking forward to being back with our family.

                                         Proud Chuck with a nice Coho Salmon.

June July Cruising Highlights

JUNE AND JULY 2013

After arriving in Ketchikan we spent the first month or so here catching up with all our friends we have made. Chuck was able to go fishing several times and was successful catching King Salmon and Coho Salmon.  We had a terrific thunder and lightning storm here followed by a magnificent rainbow.

Exercise, or lack of it when traveling on the water, can be a significant issue, so Chuck added a "spinning bike" to the boat for "working out". Here he is pedaling fast going nowhere! :)

We left Ketchikan to do a round trip around Prince of Wales Island, which was about a 360 mile trip. Almost all the islands up here have north/south channels of water and the land runs the same direction. Probably because of the advance and retreat of glaciers many years ago. While this is not exact science, there seems to be three runs of islands, eastern, central and western. The island Ketchikan is on would be east. POW was central. The waters around POW are quite remote and total wilderness. While there are several communities on POW, the city of Craig, on the west side, is the largest, at 2000 people prox. We have been to Craig several times before and enjoy being there. The docks are filled with commercial fishing boats, and pleasure boats are almost non existent. We went out to eat in Craig for a fabulous meal. If you go to www.sheltercovelodge.com you can see where we ate dinner. It was a special night. We were out about two weeks before returning to Ketchikan.

On July 4th our good friends Gary and Ruth flew to Ketchikan to spend 10 days with us. The island we are on is called Revillagigedo. The waterway around the island is called the Behm Canal and is also known as Misty Fiords National Forest. This is some of the wildest and most pristine area you could ever be in. We spent six days going around the island. In the process, we caught Dungeness crab, salmon and halibut. We caught and cooked about 15 of these wonderful babies.

The halibut weighed about 30 lbs. and they are, in our opinion, the best eating in the fish world!

In case you aren't familiar a curious couple of facts about halibut. There are born with two eyes, one on each side, but then the one eye migrates so that they are both on one side of the head. The white side lies flat on the bottom and the dark side up, which is where the eyes are located. Also the really large ones, 200-400 lbs. are all female. The males change sex mid stream and become female. Amazing.

We also caught a small Coho salmon. We actually prefer eating them more so than King Salmon. We are becoming more discriminating about salmon after coming up here so often. They are quite fun to catch as they usually jump out of water and fight quite hard. It was raining this day.

 The other highlight in July was the 4th of July parade in Ketchikan. At this time of the year it doesn't get dark until around 11PM before they can shoot off fireworks. Needless to say, we usually don't see the fireworks! There is quite a large parade that goes on for an hour or so, with lots of homemade floats, cars, trucks, equipment, you name it. The highlight is the "duck race" where they sell tickets representing a small bathtub style yellow duck. I think first prize of the duck that wins the race is around $2000. They take these ducks about a mile or so up the road and dump them in the creek that flows to the ocean. The first duck to be caught in the pollution boom that is stretched across the creek is the winner, followed by multiple small $ prizes. There are thousands of ducks. This probably would not be possible anywhere but Alaska due to EPA and environmentalists complaints. Ducks were floating around our marina for days after as our marina is located at the exit of the creek.

This area is called Creek Street with lots of tourists shops. In the old days these were all houses of ill repute. There is even a trail at the other end winding thru trees and slight wilderness called the "married mans trail" leading to the houses. Now it is tourist shops and restaurants.

We close with a picture of us celebrating our 28th

anniversary when we went out to dinner on July 13th.

2013 Alaska Cruise-May

May 2013
It has been so long since we posted, that I'm not sure I even know how to work the site anymore. In 2012 we spent the entire summer in Ketchikan, mainly because we really wanted to get to know the community and have more time for Chuck to fish with his Ketchikan Friends. We left there mid August, arrived Seattle area early September after an uneventful trip thru British Columbia. We were back home in September in San Diego.

After being stored inside a building in Oak Harbor, Wa.

out of the weather, I departed Oak Harbor (Margaret was in San Diego) on April 25th to the San Juan Islands in Washington State for a "shakedown" to be sure all systems were working well. I thoroughly enjoyed three days in Roche Harbor Resort. Check out www.rocheharbor.com. We have always enjoyed this very nice resort. My brother-in-law Lee from North Carolina joined me and we departed U.S. waters and entered Canada on May 1st to clear customs. This is done by going to specified docks where there is a direct line phone and you call customs and answer various questions seeking permission to have a boat and to travel thru Canada on our way to Alaska. They reserve the right to board your boat, but so far in doing this many times, we have never had them board us. Our goal was to reach Alaska prior to May 22nd Lee's fly out date. So we headed out right away traveling north. On May 2 and 3 we transited the large open water section of Strait of Georgia. This can be rough because it is so large, but this time, over two days, we had relatively calm weather. This is about 100 miles long.
We arrived in the city of Campbell River where we did some grocery shopping and had dinner out. We were only there one night and departed to head up into Johnstone Strait. Again calm winds were with us and bright sunny days. Lee and I enjoyed an excellent dinner that night at anchor.

 

 

We then went thru the Broughton Archipelago where we stopped at Kwatsi Bay and spent the night at Sullivan Bay marinas. There were literally no other pleasure boats around. We were quite alone. You can check out www.kwatsibay.com and www.sullivanbay.com. We moved on out into Queen Charlotte Strait for a short run due to rough weather ahead and spent a very quiet night at anchor in a bay called Blunden. There were about 6 other boats with us. The next day we moved north again to an anchorage called Allison Harbor, which was about 10 miles south of Cape Caution the first open water passage which can be quite rough. The rounding of the Cape was quite easy as we timed the good weather correctly. We anchored in a place called Green Island, which is protected quite nicely. We were joined by a commercial fishing boat and one other pleasure boat. You could look out thru an opening and assess the channel conditions before proceeding.

You can see our Ketchikan Yacht club flag on the bow pulpit.

 

On May 9th we proceeded from here to an abandoned cannery called Namu, where we explored for a couple hours and then moved up to a place called Ocean Falls. You must Google this town in British Columbia. There used to be a pulp/paper mill here that was shut down a number of years ago. There are still some people living here, mostly summertime visitors. The population is less than 100. It is a "ghost town" as there are many buildings sitting empty from when this used to be a company town. There is a HUGE lake above the town and a dam had been built many years ago with a hydro-electric facility which still produces electricity for the surrounding area. It is quite a spot. On May 10th we moved to a dock at a fishing resort call Shearwater which is adjacent to a "first nations village" or "Indian" in U.S. talk. There is actually an air strip there with daily once or twice a day service from Vancouver. Margaret and I had been apart enough so she flew from San Diego to Seattle to Vancouver where she spent the night, and then into Bella Bella where the strip is located. She arrived on the 12th. We departed on the 13th heading into the "boonies", really remote territory, on the inside passage to Alaska.

A view inside one of our anchorages



 

One of the neat things about traveling the inside passage north in the spring are the beautiful waterfalls coming off the mountain where there are lakes overflowing due to rain and melting snow. The water cascades off the mountain into the channels where we travel.



Aren't these just beautiful?
We arrived at our destination, Ketchikan Alaska on May 17th. We had an easy trip, no bad weather, no mechanical issues, everything was good. When docking, we were in a very heavy downpour of rain. This has happened every year. Ketchikan receives over 200 inches of rain annually and is literally a rain forest. We had a severe lightning and thunderstorm the other night (very rare for here) followed by a beautiful rainbow. I'll let the picture speak for itself.

Some statistics:
We traveled from Oak Harbor, Wa. to Ketchikan 735 miles and ran our engines 103 hours for an average speed of 7.13 knots. We used about 529 gallons of diesel fuel for an average of 1.39 MPG. I think our actual speed was faster, more like 8 knots since the engine hours include idle time.
Finally, a sunset view from our boat from the Kethikan Yacht Club docks where we are proud members. www.ketchikanyachtclub.com.