Baby Bear Bay

We spotted two humpbacks on the thirty-mile run from Sitka Harbor to Baby Bear. One whale worked the currents east of Kakul Narrows and the second one was feeding east of Sergius Narrows, close to Deep Bay. No surprise, we frequently spot a lone whale in both locations. Note: Baby Bear pops up frequently in the cruise notes, and with good reason. It's a convenient spot to moor and wait for slack current at Sergius, or to anchor after a late-in-the-day trip through the Narrows. It's also a nice bay, and conveniently located across the channel from great crabbing and bear watching in Deep Bay.

Early Wednesday morning, just minutes after we upped anchor and navigated a careful exit from Baby Bear Bay, I was on the bow for photos of an approaching tug with barge as it cleared the Middle Point channel markers.

It was a still, quiet morning with only a low rumble of boat engines breaking the silence. Surprise! a whale surfaced and spouted noisily right next to the boat. One more blow and then he was gone. It took a few minutes for my racing pulse to slow back to normal. That was a great way to begin a day, but I wish I had captured more than whale spray in a photo.

Sitka Harbor

A working harbor is a busy place. When the seine boats are tied up, in between openings, there is a major focus on maintenance and repair. A neighboring seiner's crew spent long hours over a couple of days working on their net, checking for tears and repairing each hole by hand. What a lot of net area to check, typically 1200 feet long by 40 feet deep, but nets are an expensive and critical piece of equipment.

In the midst of net repair and boat prep, there's always time for fun on board when the family comes to visit.

What happens to all of the salmon that are hauled aboard in a seine net? Most seiners transfer their fish to a packer (also called a tender). This pair were busy doing just that inside Sitka's breakwater. 

Photo: packer Peggy Jo on the left, seiner Defiant on the right

Photo: the large vacuum tube sucks water and fish out of the seiner's hold and pumps them into the packer. 

A working boat of a different type, this tour boat utilizes underwater viewing ports to give its passengers a glimpse of aquatic life. A scuba diver will frequently rendezvous with the boat and hand feed a variety of fish. It's a popular tourist attraction, and keeps busy when the cruise ships are in port.

We do spend some time away from the docks (and not just at the grocery or the marine supplier). This year we  revisited the Sheldon Jackson Museum. 

"If there were a museum for museums, the Sheldon Jackson Museum in Sitka would be part of the collection. It is the oldest museum in Alaska and is located in the first concrete building in the state. Construction began in 1895 and it has been occupied since 1897. The building was placed on the National Historical Register in 1972.

While the building may be as old as some of the items in its collection, its exhibits reflect recent renovation and a dedication to professional museum standards. The Museum's collection has been called a jewel in the crown of Alaska ethnographic collections."

The collected artifacts were interesting and well displayed, but we most enjoyed the time spent with Margaret, a traditional beadwork artist, and the several docents on duty who added so much life to the experience.

 Photo: traditional Tlingit headpiece with abalone shell and ermine tails

Cruising the Outside Waters

Outside waters, that’s what NOAA Weather calls this region of SE Alaska. If you look west you can see Kamchatka. No, not really... Kodiak Island and the Aleutians would get in the way. But trust me, it looks like an empty horizon where you can see the edge of the earth. Southern Baranof Island has some of the most stunningly gorgeous scenery in SE Alaska. The western coastline is rugged, with narrow fjords running inland for miles between towering, jagged mountains. Crashing surf from the Gulf of Alaska buffets the seaward side of the many small islands and the entrances to the fjords. It is gorgeous in the sunshine, and almost ghostly in the fog.

We have explored a portion of this coastline before, but were turned back by wind and high seas, boat issues, or a schedule that wouldn’t allow for waiting out the weather. This year we had a good weather window, with predicted reasonable seas and no fixed schedule. But weather is an ever-changing issue, so we kept our cruise plan flexible.

We traveled south from Sitka along the coast between Cape Edgecumbe and Cape Decision, running inside the protection of small islands whenever possible. We stayed inshore, out of the big water, and had the choice of running into any of the many sheltering inlets and bays if the winds blew up unexpectedly.

Many boaters love to travel outside in the open ocean, but I favor the security of the inside/outside route, even if our path has us winding through small, intricate passages. Some of these passages were narrow, winding and so shallow that I declared we don't need to do that again! The captain didn't comment (smart man).

Photo: First Narrows, a reasonable passage

Salmon runs were miles offshore and so were most of the fishermen (except for us) . A few trollers worked the inshore area, but we only saw a handful of boats during the week. We didn't see any other cruising boats.

Photo: Capt Ron patiently waits for fish, I brought a book and a camera

The locals report that a burgeoning sea otter population is wiping out the crab along the coast. That may be true, but it's hard not to love these comical creatures. Drat! They always manage to stay just out of range of my camera's 20x zoom - how do they know?

Photos: remember to double-click to enlarge the images.

Photo: more than 100 otter, too many to fit in one image!

Goddard Hot Springs, Dorothy Pass, Big Bay, First and Second Narrows, Scow Bay, Shamrock Bay, West Crawfish Inlet, President Bay, Cedar Pass, Herring Bay, Redoubt Bay, Kidney Cove... each one was uniquely impressive, and we were only a third of the way to Cape Decision. Then the weather forecast changed, and we returned to Sitka ahead of the forecast storm with predicted fourteen foot seas. The boat can handle lumpy water, but it's just not fun.

(Note: the weather front stalled for a few days, but turning back was still a good decision. We'll try again another year.) 

Photo: this deer was curious, coming out of the brush to watch us.

Photo: Bald eagles are easy to spot everywhere... look for the round white spots.

Photo: Seals basking in the sunshine.