El Capitan passage, narrow and shallow

                                           Snow capped mountains on the east side of Baranoff Island

                                           Main intersection in Sitka

                                           Sitka Marina

                                          Racor fuel filter overhaul and repair

"grid" where you put your boat at high tide, when

tide drops you work on bottom and float off at

high tide.

                                          Petersburg on July 4th, kids race. This is 1/2 of the town, very small

                                          Downtown Petersburg

"Purse Seiner" salmon fishing boat, Petersburg

                                          Chuck at Petersburg Marina
                                           

Greetings. We left Ketchikan on June 26th, and we headed south then west over to an island called Dall Island where we found a nice cozy anchorage. Our plan was to move around to various anchorages for the next several days but then the weather changed and we decided to get to the city of Craig where we could tie up to the dock while bad weather passed by us. Now you have to understand that Craig has barely over 1000 people, it is really small with no amenities. Well, we kep waiting for three days in this place going stir crazy, so we finally left and headed to a nice anchorage. The next night we went to an place called Devilfish Bay. We like anchoring where there is little or no wind, but the wind here was blowing about 20 knots. Our anchor is big enough that this is not an issue. But when the wind went over 30 knots and starting blowing 40 knots around 10PM at night, it required not going to bed in case the anchor came loose. Well, just as it turned dark, the anchor let loose, or so we thought, and we had to pull it up in the dark with wind howling and rain pouring down. It was scary, to say the least. The minute the anchor came up on the boat, the wind went to ZERO! Really weird. So we anchored again and the rest of the night it was calm. The next day as we proceeded to our next anchorage, we were motoring at about 8 knots of speed, Margaret was napping and we were on some open ocean type water, when all of a sudden, WHAM-BANG-SHUDDER-BOAT ROLLED HARD SIDE TO SIDE.  We could not imagine what we hit. I looked out the side of the boat, thinking we had hit a very large log (of which there are many) but instead a HUGE whale came up next to our boat. The whale had tried to surface directly underneath the boat! We were very fortunate to have not received any damage other than to our nerves which took several hours to settle down. The whale did not appear to be hurt, we just rode crossways over the side of the whale. After this experience the rest of our trip was nothing exciting. We proceeded to the town of Petersburg, population about 2,500 where we spent July 4th. They can't do fireworks until after 11PM because it is not dark enough until then. They had a parade with about 10 wheeled vehicle, mainly logging trucks as the theme was TIMBER. The parade was so small, it went around the block and they did it twice. A very nice community with a Norwegian heritage. Then we went to Sitka another really nice town. Chuck spent two days working on the fuel lines on one of the engines which was sucking air into the fuel. This is not a good thing, but after lots of work, finally solved the problem. We thought we had fixed this in Ketchikan, but it came back. So, we think its fixed now. Time will tell. After Sitka we proceeded to Juneau, the capital of Alaska, population about 30,000 or so. We arrived here on the 21st of July and will leave on the 25th. Jeff, our daughters very best friend has joined us for the next 8 days and we will travel back to Ketchikan. Otherwise we are doing well.