Jeff's Log ~ Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

Wednesday, September 3, 2008 Seward, Alaska
Small boat harbor 60 07.10N 149 26.24W

On Monday a week ago, we got up in the morning and went to the sporting goods store next to our hotel. I got a fishing license, so that we could legally fish for crab. The girl there could not tell me if the license covered crab, so we took a small hike to the fish and game dept. I had to go to the second floor, and when I got up there, the first thing that caught my eye was a pair of large bear hides hanging on the wall. When the girl came to the window, I commented about how neat it was to see the bear hides. Boy, was that a mistake! She did not share my feelings toward bear hides at all.

After that little hurdle, she was quite helpful and gave me all of the information that I needed. On the way back to the boat from there, we stopped in at the office of Karen, the gal who put our bear watching trip together, and thanked her for a job well done. Scott met us on the dock, and he and Clara returned to the boat while I went to purchase a crab trap. There are several different kinds, and I chose one made with a collapsible frame with net over it so that it can be stored in the lazarette when it is not being used.

I got to the boat, and everything was disconnected and we were ready to go. We pulled out of Kodiak and headed through the bridge and headed for the northwest side of Kodiak Island. We went through Whale Passage and saw many whales spouting. A few were close enough that we headed in their direction. The sound that a spouting whale makes is pretty distinct and hard to describe in words, but one can sense the power in the animals when you hear it. We did get close enough for some good photos. One whale was coming right at the boat, and flipped up it’s tail and dove about thirty feet away. I finally got a good whale tail picture!

There were also hundreds of sea otters, and puffins as far as the eye could see. I have been trying to get photos of those two animals too, but they never allow us to get close enough. The first night out, we anchored just off of a very nice cottage in a sheltered cove. It got pretty chilly, but the cabin stayed fairly warm, with lots of condensation dripping from the port light frame in the morning. When I raised the anchor, I was surprised by the amount of kelp that came up with it. It took a while to get it cleared before I locked the anchor down, and my hands got really cold from working with it. The next day we motored along and continued to see spectacular scenery that evening Scott found a sheltered bay which we headed up. There was one shallow spot that was surrounded with a lot of floating kelp on the way in. When we got all the way inside, there was a fish boat working right where we had planned on anchoring. We decided to anchor off of what looked like an empty shack.

After getting the anchor down, we were running the generator for heat and discussing our fuel situation, which was getting short. I thought that maybe the fish boat or some other boat could either sell us some, or tell us where we could get some. I got on the vhf radio asking any vessel to reply. There was no answer, but a few minutes later, I received a call back from the ranger station. It turns out that we were anchored right in front of the ranger station. The empty shack was in fact their supply shack. We invited Jason the ranger out onto the boat for a drink, and dinner. He came right out and we met him face to face. He is a nice young man, and was happy to see us. After a couple of drinks, he told us that he had a drum of diesel fuel, but nothing that used it. Scott gave him a bottle of rum, and I went ashore with him and filled two jerry cans with diesel. There were two other guys there who were volunteers from colleges and getting credit towards their education. Jason had baked some cinnamon sweet rolls, and John had eaten half of them, so Jason told him he was not invited back to the boat. Jason did invite Jim to come along, so Clara sliced up the pork chops so that there was enough to go around. She made tequila sunrise pork chops with yellow rice, and everyone enjoyed it. A nice cocktail party ensued, and everyone went to bed with a nice buzz on, and Jason and Jim returned to the ranger station. We resumed our course which was loosely heading for Seward, when we saw on the map there was a glacier fairly close by. Scott and I discussed the pros and cons of going out of our way to see the glacier, and decided that if necessary, we would go slower to conserve fuel. The side trip to the glacier turned out to be the high point of the trip!

It was McCarty Glacier, and we traveled twenty miles up McCarty Fjord to see it up close and personal. As we entered the fjord, there was what looked like a crashed plane on the side of a large hill. I looked at it through the binoculars, Scott looked, and Clara looked. We all thought it was a crashed plane. Then we brought up the stabilized binoculars, and we could see that it was just snow. We all got a chuckle out of that. As we got close to the glacier, we began seeing large chunks of floating ice. A couple of the larger chunks even had that unique blue tint to them. The closer we got, the more floating ice there was, and I went up on the bow to spot for Scott. We didn’t want to hit any ice with the boat because the edges are very sharp, and will go right through the paint at the waterline.

The hills on either side of the glacier were topped with walls of snow, and some of the snow cliffs had to be a couple of hundred feet high. The ice of the glacier was very jagged, and has a really pretty blue glow to it. As I was looking at it, a chunk fell off and into the water, and a few seconds later, there was a noise like loud thunder that came from it. We heard a few more of these “thunder” noises coming from the glacier cracking as we sat there. The water in the fjord gets turned sort of milky blue from the glacier melting. There is so much mineral content in the water that if you put some in a glass and let it sit, it will separate and leave a deposit in the bottom. The whole experience was pretty incredible, and something that I will never forget. We ended up getting to within a hundred feet of the glacier. And slowly nudged into the pack ice that was floating in the fjord. Seeing the glacier took a lot of time, and we had to change our anchor site for the night.