After dinner last night we took a brief dinghy ride over to the falls to look for bears…not here yet. In the morning, Kevin and I got up early to watch the Formula 1 British Grand Prix live (5:55am!). Kinda fun to be able to do that out here where we had no service at all in previous years! After the race, we pulled anchor and headed for Peril Strait. … Read more
We spent a week or so in Juneau after the flotilla ended…visiting with friends and family (Laura’s brother Jason flew down from Anchorage with a friend for a visit), and made good use of the rental car we reserved (used the Turo app for the first time…will definitely do that again!) We took a couple trips to Western Auto & Marine, Jerry’s Meats & Seafood (smoked salmon, double smoked bacon, … Read more
Once again, everyone wants to know what time Airship is going to leave, so we say 6am, and when we get up at 5:30am, two of the other three boats are long gone and one is pulling its anchor. Fine then. 🙂 Conditions in Stephens Passage were calm and even glassy for our cruise north into Juneau. We watched a humpback breaching to the left of a cruise ship (hope … Read more
We enjoyed our last day in Ford’s Terror (where we never saw any bears at all for the first time ever), retrieved our prawn traps for the last bunch of coon stripe shrimp, and then started making our way out to the entrance (exit) around 5pm to arrive between 5:30-5:45pm. Juneau high slack was 5:15pm, so this should work out perfectly. We exited Ford’s Terror with very little current, no … Read more
A downright leisurely morning in Tracy Arm Cove — we didn’t leave until just before 9am. The plan for today is to head up Endicott Arm to see how close we can get to Dawes Glacier, before turning around and heading for the entrance to Ford’s Terror so we arrive around 3:30-4pm. High slack in Juneau is at 4pm, so we should be able to transit the entrance somewhere between … Read more
Every summer during the flotillas, almost every evening, there’s discussion about what time people want to leave in the morning. Sometimes we have a reason to need to leave early (weather, timing for current and tides, things like that), and when we don’t have a reason to leave early, we leave it up to the individual boats. We’ll put in the written plan, even “Leave whenever you want today!” Inevitably, … Read more
We wanted to leave sometime before 6am this morning because it was a long day (53nm) down to Taku Harbor. As has become customary, most of us are pulling anchor at the time we all said we’d set our alarms for…so 5am it was! But the reward was pretty incredible. We had a tiny bit of wind and a little chop, but the wind wasn’t supposed to pick up until … Read more
We never did see the sow and teeny tiny new cub that our friends saw at Pavlof, but before we left this morning, this one came out and was munching some sedge grass on shore. There definitely will be more bears here later when the salmon are running. See last year’s post from the end of July. Left to our own devices with a comparatively short day (30nm) and a “leave … Read more