Much has happened since the last blog posting. We are back with a working boat and left Wrangell for a few days of cruising around the local area that included nights in Kindergarten Bay, Coffman Cove, Red Bay and Roosevelt Harbor.
While walking around Coffman Cove, we came across a substantial green house operation. There was a woman inside who waved us in. After the usual hello’s and where are you from’s? she gave us the low down on the green house.
It turns out that she is a teacher and the greenhouse is run by the students at the local high school, funded by grants from the state and school district. Due to shipping, fresh produce is hard to get and is expensive when it is in Alaska. The green house operations are part of the school program. They provide fresh produce for the salad bar at the schools everyday and any excess is sold at the weekly farmers market which offsets some of the costs. Sounds like a winning program all round.
Cam came up from Vancouver to spend a week with us. He flew into Wrangell so once again we were back there. Wrangell has some kind on magical bungee cord on us. We get so far and then it snaps us back. With Cam on board we headed up to Petersburg and further up to Tracy Arm where we were able to dodge the ice bergs (pick up truck size to 3 story apartment size) and bergie bits (small chunks of ice ranging from beach ball size to pick up truck size) and made our way up the fjord to Sawyer Glacier.
The main glacier face was packed with floating ice and a couple of National Geographic cruise ships, so we could not get too close.
We decided to try our luck up the north arm and were greeted with a nearly clear path all the way to the glacier face and not another boat in the bay. Absolutely stunning !!!
A little concerning when the charts all say the area is “unsurveyed” and our chart plotter shows us 1800 feet onto land with 300 feet of water still under us.
The inlet next to Tracy Arm is Endicot Arm. While we were entering Tracy we noticed the ice packs in Endicot and were wondering if we had a chance to check it out as well. As we were discussing this we heard a conversation on the VHF radio between two other boats and one was describing how they were forced to turn back at the entrance as they could not find a way through the ice flows. Our decision was made for us.
It was very fortunate that we had Cam on board with us as the next morning as we were headed back to Petersburg we hit the cruisers version of the “F” word FOG. This cut our visibility down from miles to meters is some areas. Cam, with his experience on the tug boats, was able to fine tune our radar and we successful navigated our way back to Portage Cove for the night. The next morning we were in various degrees of fog again as we made our way back down to Petersburg and through Wrangell Narrows and back to Wrangell. Cam flies back home in a couple of days but we are taking a tour from Wrangell to the Anan Bay Bear Observatory before he goes. That place was so cool it deserves its own post. More to come. Stay tuned.