So Troup Narrows fully delivered (well, except for the crab closure, but that’s fine). As you can see from the spoiler feature photo, we got some fantastic aurora last night. But we’ll start earlier in the day.
Kevin got some great aerials of the anchorage and surrounds after we arrived and got settled:
We all dinghied around Troup Passage and did some exploring. This is at the head of our anchorage…quite a few dead salmon on the bottom, and a huge bunch of them swimming fast around the dinghy!
Scott and Tracy came over to Airship for dinner. We grilled some salmon and asparagus, Scott and Tracy brought cornbread, and we had a great time catching up. We spotted a nice healthy black bear on shore after dinner…yay!! The bear wasn’t out for very long, but really glad we got to see it!
As the sky got darker (and there were no clouds, for once!), we checked the Aurora apps and though the forecast numbers looked okay but not super high (kp 3-4), at some point around 10pm I got a notification that we should still check the skies because of some higher activity something something something (I don’t remember). So around 10:30, right as we were going to go to sleep, I went out to take a look at the sky. It was definitely increasing in brightness to the north (where there’s nothing to make the sky bright at all up here) — I soon called Kevin out to come watch.
This is Scott’s boat Impulse in the photos with the aurora:
We tried and tried to get in touch with Scott or Tracy…I texted/emailed them both, called (Scott’s phone went straight to voicemail), and we even eventually tried honking Airship’s horn, and we could see lights on in the salon, but no movement and no response. This really felt like one of those not-to-be-missed situations, so we finally got in the dinghy (me: robe, slippers, PFD) and motored over there…knocked on the hull, yelled hello, etc. Nothing. We really tried!
There was intense bioluminescence in the water tonight, so dinghying around was almost as fun as watching the sky! The outboard of course left a trail of sparkling stars, but the coolest surprise was all the salmon zipping around leaving glowy contrails through the water. FUN!! We drove around a while just looking for salmon…too bad we couldn’t capture how awesome that was!
Back on Airship we watched for another hour or so and eventually saw movement on Impulse…yay!!
What an amazing night!