Post # 6 From Glacier Bay, July 30

Entry # 6.  Beginning at Juneau

After the day we arrived, in lowering clouds, we had two rainy days in Juneau.  Not to worry: the first day was largely given over to boat chores and shopping – we have a long stretch in Glacier Bay coming up, including the arrival of David and Lucas for a few days.  Crankcase oil and filters were changed, bags and bags of groceries were loaded on, and halibut “Haliburgers” at Hotbites at the head of the wharf needed to be eaten.  More of the same the following day, except that it was time to do something more strenuous.  So Jess, Frank and I headed up the Roberts Mountain trail, a popular hike for Juneau folk, which ends up at the top of the tramway that starts down at the cruise ship dock.  There is a Nepalese saying: “ratto, batto, chiplo matto”, roughly translated as “red mud slippery trail”.  This was an understatement – the trail was steep, very muddy, and impossible not to slide on. Besides, it was raining and foggy.  So we saw nothing but thick forest and a lot of mud, and managed to get a lot of the latter on ourselves.  But it was a good workout, and we all met up at the top, where there is a nice restaurant, for some hot cider and a view of the resident eagle.  In the evening we wandered around Juneau, seeing the sights and the tourist bars, and had a good Mexican dinner.



Downtown Juneau



In the marina, we had a chance to talk to some of the locals who make their living from the sea here.  A crab fisherman (a Middlebury grad) told us how he’d wandered around after college, fishing sometimes with friends in Alaska during the summer.  Then he fished one winter, met a girl in Juneau, and that was that.  At the dock, his boat was full of 5,000 pounds of Dungeness crabs waiting to be unloaded and shipped to Portland, Oregon by air, to be distributed from there.  He has two kids in college, and his wife has gone back to work, of necessity.  The long-liners were getting ready for a new salmon season opening:  there are multitudes of seasons here, allocated to various areas, which seldom last for more than two days, during which you can catch as much as you can.  As a rule, these folks can fish for two or three days, and then come back to port for two or three before heading out on a new “season”, all dictated by the government.

Things improved dramatically in the morning, with the sun largely present, and the mountains and glaciers shimmering around us.  So we headed back to the Mendenhall Glacier, and hiked the 3.5 mile East Glacier Loop trail, up hill and down dale, through ever changing vegetation depending on when in the geological cycle the glacier had last been there.  Then it was time to refuel and head on out, with a langourous  sail in the sun down the Lynn Canal to the small inlet known as Funter Bay, in a glorious sunset with fish jumping all over the place and a school of Dall Porpoises playing in our bow wave.  We’ve been fishing, too, in a thoroughly disorganized and unschooled manner.  Nothing caught yet.  It is more likely that some stupid fish will jump into our dinghy than be caught on our hook.  A phone call to Frank Kibbe for advice was instructive:  I’m too impatient and trolling too fast.  What else is new..

The road to Glacier Bay from Funter Bay is the Icy Strait, which comes by its name honestly.  But for us it was a romp.  We sailed out of Funter Bay in a brisk Northwester, and beat our way up to Hoonah in a rising sea.  Hoonah is the largest Tlingit settlement left in Alaska.  It is there, on the south side of the Icy Strait, because several hundred years ago, at the inevitable onslaught of the little Ice Age in Alaska, the Tlinget settlement in what is now Gustavus and Bartlett Cove (Glacier Bay) was ground down under the advancing ice.  The village elders had the good sense to head south.  When Vancouver first sailed there in 1790 and made his seminal charts, he showed the whole of what is now Glacier Bay as “ice field”.  That was what Muir expected when he first arrived in 1879, but by then the ice had receded some twenty five miles or so.  In any event, Hoonah is now a town of perhaps 500 souls, subsisting mostly on fishing and logging.  But, probably again due to some substantial pork, there is a large marina facility, filled with fish boats and a few of us, surrounded by a huge stone breakwater.  An ancient Tlingit burial ground, with old totems, marks the entrance on a small island.  In addition, the town boasts an Olympic size swimming pool in its own separate building.  The shower in the harbormaster’s office was nice, but the timer on the hot water wasn’t working too well.  I was full of soap and shampoo when the water went off.  What to do?  I wrapped my town around me, ran around through the building looking for the harbormaster, and when I found him he unloaded enough quarters on me to finish the job.  Big laughs all around.

Icy Strait in the morning was a flat calm in glorious sunlight.  16,000’ Mt. Fairweather, which presides over the entire Glacier Bay area, was glistening in the sun along with its entire range.  Orca whales appeared as we powered along the 25 miles to Glacier Bay.  A huge swarm of sea lions and otters greeted us at the entrance buoy, and then we were in Bartlett Cove, where the check-in point and Ranger Station is.  Our plan was to check in, get the required boaters’ briefing, and then head up the bay a few miles in anticipation of a shopping, a cleaning, and a reception for Dave and Lucas at Bartlett Cove the next day.

The whales are the most abundant in Bartlett Cove in recent memory.  Some 30 of them swim, feed, and play in this small, active cove.  They blow, bellow, throw themselves up with mouths gaping open, sing, and fully mingle with the many boats coming and going.  Happy mixture!  We pulled away from the dock about three, amidst the whales around us.  Within two minutes there was an alarm sounding below, so I went below to find it.  It was the propane stove alarm, so I opened the hatch into the engine room and was greeted by billowing acrid smoke coming out of the hatch.  Although the engine dials read appropriately, the engine was making a lot of strange and nasty sounds.  First stop was the fire extinguisher, and the second was to turn around and head into the nearby anchorage.  In a minute or so I was sure that we could drift in, and so I shut the engine down and eventually we got the anchor down.  By now the boat was pretty well full of smoke.  But the nasty sounds had stopped, and the smoke seemed to be stabilizing.

Ranger Rachel was at the other end of my VHF call to the station on shore, and she just happened to know someone she could recommend as a mechanic i(Zack) in Gustavus.  Her car was in his shop right now.  It was Friday night at 5, so I called Zack, and after some discussion he graciously consented to drive over to the cove (25 minutes) and have a look.  He came aboard, sniffed a little, and said it smelled like a starter problem to him.  JACA’s starter is on the wrong side of the engine – one needs to be a contortionist (in the bilge) to reach it.  Zack started working on inaccessible engines in his father’s fishing boat, and at age twelve was the one appointed to crawl around in the tightest spaces and fix things.  JACA’s starter had indeed fried itself, and in the process had burned out a large wire, a rubber covering, and some adjacent wires.  But the beauty of the whole thing was that JACA had a spare starter on board.  So Zack went to work, and in less than two hours the old starter was off, the new one was on, and we were all sitting in the cockpit having a beer.  In the process we got Zack’s full life story, which one could write a steamy novel about.  But he was a gem, and when I told him he’d gone beyond the call of duty he said it gave him real pleasure to help out folks like us who had a family on a boat visiting Glacier Bay.

Gustavus is the town with the airport serving the Glacier Bay National Park whose entrance is about 10 miles away.  In winter, 350 people live in Gustavus.  In summer, a few more.  The town itself is spread out over a surprisingly large area.  There are a couple of small grocery/miscellany shops, a few B & B’s, the most notable of which is The Gustavus Inn which serves a very good, expensive dinner as well, and a good pizza joint.  Pam did a reasonable shopping here, but it is quite basic.  We needed a couple of additional coffee mugs for the boat, and none were to be had in any shop.  So I was directed to the “community chest” thrift store, which was a small house-like event close to the airport.  There were plenty of cracked and scratched mugs, including a few plastic ones from the Glacier Bay Lodge.  So I picked out several and asked the lady what the bill would be: 35 cents.  It is a friendly place too – when you walk down the road every car driver automatically waves to you, and if you hang out your thumb you are immediately picked up.

Late in the day the plane from Juneau arrived, and David and Lucas stepped off into a gorgeous Alaska afternoon.  Their flight had been spectacular, of course, and the addition of whales and porpoises playing in the harbor was icing on the cake for them.  It was a great reunion on what was now a pretty cramped boat.  No matter, for the family is now almost all together for a brief few days in Glacier Bay.  I wonder if JACA has ever played host to two five-year olds before.  They are having a grand time playing all over the boat, while Pam does triple duty as the sought-after Nana, the baker of all manner of treats with the kids, and first mate.

Our good luck on the weather ran out the next morning.  We headed out early, to catch the last of the incoming tide in fog and rain, stopping for lunch at Blue Mouse Cove and heading onward to Reid Inlet for the night.  The weather was a little better there and when we turned the corner into the harbor, Reid Glacier was shining blue and beautiful right at us, even in the clouds and mist at the peaks.  The first order of business was to go ashore and touch it – this is one of the few glaciers that terminates at the water’s edge but does not calve off into the water.  While all glaciers move forward (they are getting new snow all the time), the rate of melting now exceeds the rate of advance, and Reid has retreated to the shore line, making it accessible to approach without danger of being crushed or tipped over by a wave.  The terrain around it is moon-like, representing the earliest stages of life after the glacier leaves.  Basically it looks like a gravel pit abandoned by bulldozers after a few half-hearted tries to smooth things out.  No signs of life, a few rushing streams with dirty water pouring out from underneath the glacier, and vast quantities of mud and silt covering everything.  After a little while, a few flowers begin to pop out and bloom.  Then some hardy grasses and mosses, and finally the shrubbery starts to appear after a few years.  The whole “succession” of rebirth after the glacier leaves is laid in front of you at Reid – as Jessica put it, it is a crash course in the global warming process.

In the morning we headed to a highlight of Glacier Bay:  the John’s Hopkins Glacier (via the smaller but thoroughly enjoyable Lamplugh Glacier along the way), about a dozen miles distant.  We got within about two miles of it before deciding we weren’t going push JACA through the ever thickening ice any more.  On the ice all around us were hundreds of seal pups – they are born on the ice and spend their first few months there.  The glacier rose majestically in front of us, and we could hear it creaking, groaning and occasionally calving off small pieces.  The pictures you see of JACA at the glacier were taken by another boat that followed us in and eventually passed us.  We traded pictures back at Reid Inlet the next morning!  By now the weather was deteriorating quickly, and while we wanted to complete the day with a run up to the Marjorie and Grand Pacific Glaciers visited each day by two huge cruise ships, the ice and fog discouraged us and we headed back to Reid Inlet for more glacier exploring there.  The weather was in fact worse in the morning, so those two must wait for another cruise.  We headed out to another part of the park, radar running full bore and cruise ships honking in the main channel.

The evening found us in Tidal Inlet, a long indentation with large avalanche-strewn slopes on one side, and lower green areas on the other, sprouting waterfalls every few yards.  It was calm and misty, so we picked a likely spot and dropped the anchor in nearly 100 ft of water a few yards from the shore, then unrolled the spool of stern line in the after part of the cockpit and took it around a tree and back.  JACA’s stern, in 35 feet or so of water, was a few feet from the shore, and we were snug as a bug.  The kayak went off exploring, and we fell asleep to the sounds of the waterfalls. 

No better weather in the morning, but we headed up the twenty-five mile long Muir Inlet to explore some more glaciers.  When Muir established a summer base camp at the entrance to the Inlet in the 1880’s, that’s where the glaciers started.  Since Vancouver’s time, the glaciers here have receded faster than any others in recorded history.  I wonder what our grandchildren will see fifty years from now…

The rain came and went, the fog came and went, and the clouds sometimes lifted a little to let us see the enormous peaks all around us.  A late lunch at the Riggs Glacier, followed by dinghy explorations into the McBride Glacier, completed our education in glaciers in Glacier Bay.  At Riggs, we reached the northernmost point of this trip: Latitude 59 degrees 4 minutes north, which is as far north as I’ve ever been in command of a boat.  It was worth a beer!

On the way into the McBride Inlet, which can now be done only by dinghy, a forlorn group of kayakers trying to establish camp on the inlet’s beach waved to us – it was pouring cold rain, and the water temperature was a balmy 33 degrees.  While the scenery was great, we were happy to know that we could retreat to the warmth of JACA’s dry cabin!  That night we retreated also, to the entrance of the Muir Inlet in quiet North Sandy Cove, a favorite of campers and boaters alike. It had recently been closed to the campers because of bears.  Sure enough, even before we got our anchor down there was a big black bear on shore to greet us.

With slightly better weather in the morning, we meandered our way back to Bartlett Cove.  First stop was South Marble Island, which is off limits for landing, and we soon learned why.  As we drew closer, great roaring sounds came from herds of sea lions living there.  So we shut off the motor, pulled out the jib in the faint breeze, and slowly drifted by.  A chorus of sea lions is somewhat similar to a truly awful mens’ singing chorus.  Loud fart-like barking is accompanied by a background of general moaning and groaning, producing a loud dissonant buzz that might come from a monastery of very sick monks.  Meanwhile these large creatures flop about on the rocks, and occasionally fall into the ocean with great splashes as if someone had thrown them into the swimming pool.  While watching all this, a couple of humpbacks surfaced next to us, unconcerned about anything but working on lunch.

Today (Friday July 29) has been the day to say farewell to Jessica, Frank, Zia, David and Lucas, which wasn’t easy.  Two active five-year olds on a sailboat isn’t easy on either us or them, but they behaved beautifully most of the time, much more than could be expected.  Some of this was due to Pam’s and their parents’ valiant and unflagging efforts to keep them entertained in the cabin when the weather wouldn’t let anything else happen.  We also read a lot out loud, with repeats of classics such as Charlotte’s Web and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and endless replaying of a performance of Peter and the Wolf I did with the symphony two decades ago.  But a lot of it was their inherent good nature, happiness to have a chance to play a lot with each other, and willingness to try something new every day.  It was a rare and wonderful family experience, and we’re very happy that it could happen.

We will leave Glacier Bay tomorrow, bound for Sitka.  It will be a much quieter and calmer boat.  Veteran crew member Joel Tranum has joined us.  Just before he arrived (with some good steaks from Wellesley!), a bunch of southerners came in on their little sport fishing boat.  They had been out fishing for halibut, as they do for three weeks a year here.  Today they had caught a lot, keeping only ten, the largest of which weighed 100 pounds.  All were neatly filleted and were headed for the local freezer to be prepared for shipment home with them.  They happily gave us a huge fillet – enough for at least two meals.  When they leave next week, they will be accompanied by their catch of about 3000 pounds of frozen halibut fillets in 50 pound boxes, destined for the freezers of family and friends in North Carolina.  Next summer they’ll be back for more.  And so it goes in Alaska.