Pacific NW

Expeditions

Upon waking I met with Shayar, Matt, and family and we took a long soak in the springs. We found a toad floating dead in the hottest pool, thoroughly cooked. Matt tossed it out and it landed with a thud, appalling several of the other bathers. I suddenly realized what time it was and ran back to the boat in order to catch a good tide down the Chatham Strait. At the dock I found Justin, and he had gotten the boat all ready to go. A box of wine sat in the galley, which Vic had given us. We said our hurried and regretful good-byes and left our hot spring paradise. A short while later we came to Red Bluff Bay, a place of indescribable beauty. This whole region is simply one of the more spectacular parts of the globe! Unfortunately, today the anchorage in Red Bluff Bay was infested by LWEPs (large white expensive powerboats). We placed our bets on Gut Bay a few miles to the south, and headed out of Red Bluff. Justin and I split our sides laughing last night when we discovered a new law of nature: the whale makes its whale noises, the elk makes its bugle calls, and the LWEP captains use their bow thrusters to communicate over long distances. “Full starboard bow thrust”! we imagine one of them commanded in Red Bluff Bay, for bow thrusters of all horsepower and magnitude were crowded into the anchorage. As is turns out, we were right in going to Gut Bay. The geography of the bay defies the laws of physics and gravity. You just have to see it to believe it. Our anchorage is a basin roughly 3/4 mile round with a large stream at one end. “Stop the boat”!! shouted Justin as we made our way through the uncharted channel into the basin. Thick schools of salmon swam everywhere around the boat, right at the surface of the water! Justin frantically cast out the fishing lines. Entering the inner chamber we found that the ENTIRE BAY was stuffed completely chuck-a-block with literally millions of leaping salmon. Old-timers say that they can remember a time when the fish ran so thick you could walk from one side of the lake to the other on their backs. I know what they mean now. If you were to freeze time and space, you could literally walk anywhere in the basin by stepping on their backs! At any one time we could see at least 150 salmon leaping high into the air, rising out and falling back into the millions below. Within two minutes I landed a fish. I can’t even begin to describe the awesome geography of the bay. Under a towering verticle peak and glacier we rowed through the salmon across the bay. To see all those huge fish swirling around the boat was an experience beyond compare. We were speechless. Quite literally you couldn’t see the bottom of the lagoon. We got out on shore and explored a river valley. Absolutely massive stands of old growth spruce, hemlock and cedar trees filled the valley. I’ve rarely seen such a remarkable forest. Bear scat, tracks, and large game trails criss-crossed and littered the valley bottom in more abundance than I’ve ever seen. Bald eagles picked at the dead salmon on shore, strewing their guts all around the forest. We climbed our way up the trunk of a fallen tree that lay across the stream. It had a diameter of 15 feet or more, and gave us a good vantage point to assess the stream. The more hardy salmon were swimming powerfully up the rushing waters and jumping over logs and rocks to gain the pools farther up. It was quite a powerful experience just to be amongst such a fantastic and healthy ecosystem! At the same time we were quite aware of the dozens of 600 pound grizzly bears that were roaming the forest all around us. Being number two on the food chain heightened our awareness to the point that we jumped at every noise. We chopped down a tree and crafted spears and clubs. Eventually the bear habitat became so thick that we considered it unsafe to proceed further, even if we had rifles. That hike was a remarkable experience that I will never forget. We cautiously waded back down the river and let the grizzlies feed on the salmon in peace. In the evening and all throughout the night we could hear the constant splashing and slapping of the salmon, whipping the waters of the lagoon into a non-stop frothing feeding frenzy.

Justin and I spent the entire day relaxing in the 107 degree water of the hot springs and meeting new people. In the early afternoon Suzanne led us up to the trailhead to Sadie Lake. We hand-over-handed it straight up the mountain on a muddy slide referred to as the “trail”. At one point I unsuspectingly planted my foot and sank knee-deep into the watery brown mud. It was an excellent hike through beautiful alpine country. The air smelled like Washington’s Cascade mountain region and it felt good to be sweating and getting dirty. High into the Baranof Island wilderness we came upon magnificent Sadie Lake, where we hopped out onto a small island and paused at the shoreline. For an hour or so we sat on some comfortable rocks and watched the trout swimming in front of us. On our way down the mountain we stopped at Baranof Lake where we met some folks who were visiting Alaska for the week. One of the older fellows was also named Peter. We exchanged a knowing glance, and without any further words we hastily plunged into the icy waters of the lake and took a 10 minute swim. The warm air of mid-day felt so nice after getting out that I didn’t even need to soak in the nearby hot springs afterward. I spent a good part of the day mending holes in my clothing. When I was near finished Vic invited us over for dinner again. We had his famous beans and enjoyed another evening of nice conversation with him and Suzanne. I filled a sail bag with alder shavings from Vic’s woodworking. They will make excellent kindling! After dinner I stepped aboard our new neighbor’s gillnetter. Shayar is a 24-year-old skipper making a go at fishing in Alaska. He is fishing with his friend Matt, and his parents are visiting for awhile on board. I found Shayar down in the engine room, covered in grease with tools in hand. They were all fixing the boat’s kerosene stove, laughing, and having a great time of it. It is nice to see another captain my age, especially one so down-to-earth and also having a blast in Alaska.

It was wonderful waking up in Tenakee again! We rose late and made our way to the bakery in town, where we broke our seafood-hunting diet with fresh bread. Later I used the internet computer at the library. I couldn’t get into Yahoo! to check my mail because it was a strange computer. The librarian and another lady from town didn’t know anything about computers either. They started jabbing the screen with their fingers and shaking the box. Somehow the three of us got the thing working with a lot of luck! Justin and I walked the town and acquired more top-notch kindling for the woodstove. Alaskan yellow cedar. It makes the boat smell very good inside. We also took on a full load of dry split spruce. There was a huge pile of it at the end of the dock and we got it from the same fellow, Gary, whom we traded beer for wood before. What an excellent feeling to have a full woodpile again! The gravel “road” through town is lined chock-full with berries of all sorts. Today the thimbleberries were out in full force, and we grazed our way through town. People here grow fantastic gardens, and all around were cherry trees, apples, raspberries, strawberries–everything. The air smells sweet with all the flowers and the humpback whales are still out there in the inlet chuffing away. At times like these I have to ask myself why I would ever leave such a place. It is true paradise! In the late afternoon it began to downpour. Justin and I went for a hike to Indian River, outside of town. A winding path led us under huge spruce and cedar trees, their canopies so thick that the ground was bone-dry underneath the bigger ones. We got up to the bridge that crosses the river and suddenly a mother grizzly bear reared her head up out of the salmonberry bushes directly in front of us! It was a moment in time unto itself, like no other, She roared in our faces and lunged off into the brush, snapping a broad path through the vegetation. Her cub scampered wildly at her feet! There was an instant when we weren’t sure if she was going to turn back, but then she was gone. Justin and I drew together and opened our jackets out to appear larger. We yelled and stomped the ground and probably caused the bear some minor irritation. Once on the comfort of the suspension foot-bridge we watched the bears from a more secure position, as they made their way up the river. Talk about experiencing nature first-hand! I stayed up very late reading, writing, and soaking in the hot springs.

We have just witnessed a major whale event in the Peril Strait. Spectacular! The boat became surrounded on all sides by many, many humpback whales. Right off the bow, stern, port, starboard, underneath the boat, and all over the horizon perhaps 50 whales surged up from the water! We were witness to a huge lunge-feeding! All we could do was scream as the 45-50 foot long whales breached completely out of the water, all around the boat. I have never seen anything like it! In conjunction with the whales, salmon were leaping everywhere too. The whales drew closer. Our surroundings became a chaos of flukes, flippers, enormous splashes as they leapt free of the water. The tremendous sounds of their breathing and spray from their blowholes erupted everywhere in all quadrants of the horizon. Several more squadrons of humpbacks were a few hundred yards off, and we were smack in the midst of a very large pod. The experience is impossible to describe, and no I-Max Theater could ever do it justice. It brought tears to my eyes. Twice the length of our boat, the whales swam directly alongside us. They arched their huge backs and threw their giant flukes up into the air when they sounded. We awoke to drizzle in the morning. Pulling up the crab trap we found one rock crab, two tanner crabs, a giant starfish, and a softball- sized hermit crab. We kept the rock crab and boiled it for breakfast. Fresh Alaskan crab is superior tasting to lobster, in my opinion. Justin and I are still on our diet of eating nothing except what we glean from the sea. It was a long drizzly run up Chatham Strait to Tenakee. On shore we spotted a giant bear running down the beach at a tremendous velocity! The bear thrashed from side to side and ran aimlessly in all directions, sometimes throwing itself into the ocean with a terrific splash. I had always heard bears could run really fast, but this was unbelievable! It appeared half-crazed. The salmon around the boat were doing their acrobatics and swimming into a river mouth where the crazy bear and several other bears were milling about. We arrived at Tenakee in darkness at 2300 hours and promptly walked into town, where we took our soaks in the wonderful hotsprings there. It is always a good feeling to be back in Tenakee–I really like this village.

We cast off our moorings in Sitka after a rushed morning, running around like chickens with our heads cut off. What an incredible feeling it is to be on the water again. Our world of concerns shrinks to the size of a 27′ sailboat as we bound out for the distant horizons. Anything we forgot to buy in town we can make do with the materials at hand. Justin and I purchased a crate of lemons and exotic spices, and that was well enough for our re-supply. There are so many salmon out here it is ridiculous! Literally, very literally, they are jumping in every channel, bay, beach, and lagoon in astonishing numbers. It is not uncommon to see 7 or 8 leaping at the same time, and there is never a second where you can’t see at least one. In the late salmon-jumping afternoon we entered Peril Strait. I had made a two-hour mistake in navigation and we found the tide against us. At Sergius Narrows the tide was racing at 8.5 knots against us, which means we went 2.5 knots backwards. I played around in the hydraulic flow for awhile. It looked like a healthy river with standing and breaking waves and all. We were spun around in huge whirlpools and repeatedly sucked into and pushed out of the main flow. After a few curses we retreated to a backeddy and waited out the tide. The fish in here were leaping in formation all about the boat. One of them almost smacked its head into our bow! We fished. Justin and I hadn’t eaten a thing all day, and were quite hungry. The first hour of fishing was extremely discouraging. Not a bite and yet they were flocking the bay and we could see them everywhere. Finally Justin got a bite! As he was reeling it in the fish got off and disappeared. Quickly he caught another and we heaved it into the cockpit. The salmon thrashed around and we were worried about it jumping out of the boat! Justin pounced on it and killed it quickly with a knife. Immediately he filleted the fish and threw it into the skillet with garlic and maple syrup, and produced a huge delicious meal. I in the meanwhile was occupied with events of my own. As I was hauling in our downriggers I leaned over the side of the boat. My glance was met face to face with an empty hollow stare of a seal’s eyes. A corpse! Seals have very human-like features and it was very disturbing when it became tangled in our fishing gear. Shortly thereafter I made a stupid mistake with my knife and cut my finger slightly. Blood, blood everywhere and the cockpit scuppers ran red with fish blood. I sat down and passed on the salmon dinner, but Justin ate the whole fish. It was a powerful experience for him as he isn’t eating anything except for the fish he catches. At sunset I once again attempted the tidal rapids. On the fourth try we made it through, following the back eddies near shore. We made it into our anchorage just before darkness. On our way in we threw out the crab trap, using the salmon head for bait. Herring and salmon are having a feeding frenzy in our bay here. There is a fantastic echo in the anchorage. All evening, loud bird calls and the percussive “slap” of leaping salmon reverberated throughout the mountains.

Tragedy struck today when the computer erased our entire stock of photos for the month of July. This further solidifies my hatred for these machines. I’ve never put any stock in the digital world and never will. Oh well. There’ll be more photos. We spent the rest of the day admiring huge totem poles in a large park outside the city. Salmon ran thick as carpet up the stream and thousands of ravens perched in the treetops. They made the most unusual clicking and croaking noises and swarmed about us as we walked under the tall trees. In the evening Justin and I treated ourselves to dinner. We laughed about the pictures over milkshakes and wine.

Half a dozen tan deer milled about on the pale green grassy shores this morning. I got up early and watched them for several hours. I caught up on world affairs by reading a month-old comics section of the Minneapolis newspaper and “The Onion” while I sipped a mocha and watched the deer. When Justin awoke we weighed anchor and pulled up the crab trap. I love pulling up that trap and watching the strange animals inside come into view from the murky depths below. Today we had 3 crabs in it but they were all females so we had to throw them back. It was a short hop over to Sitka. Justin and I ran over to the post office to pick up letters and packages. We ate dinner at a Chinese restaurant and then walked all over the city. We went out to the University on Japonski Island and let ourselves into the buildings there. We met several students and teachers and played a game of pool in the rec room. “Silent Partner” is a lone sailboat surrounded by thousands of fishing boats at the dock. Most of the fishermen are very friendly. I feel right at home because they all pee off the dock too. In the big cities down south this practice is considered shameful. There, you must first pee into a big bowl of drinking water and then flush it into a pipe that eventually leads to the ocean. As I happily peed over the side of the boat I looked out over the harbor and began to wonder why I’m heading back down to Puget Sound.

We are experiencing night-time darkness again. There was a rapid transition as we sailed south and east from Prince William Sound. Suddenly (in two days days) we went from our world of eternal light to a full-blown 5 hours of stars, twighlight, and blackness. It is catching me off-guard, limiting our navigational options, and causing us to go to bed and wake up earlier. For the first time in two months I had to turn on our anchor light while we slept! Soon after waking Justin and I became extremely excited to explore the mineshaft again. We gathered together ropes, candles, lifejackets, and all kinds of flashlights and extra batteries. We carried in several long and stout wooden beams to span distances of unknown depth, a long iron bar that we found, and the flare gun. And food in the event we spent the whole day in there. When we reached yesterday’s endpoint we roped up and began testing the integrity of the old mine. Eventually we got past the water area and followed the shaft all the way to its terminus in the bowels of the mountain. On our way back Justin dropped the iron bar into the deepest water pit. We heard it clank as it hit the rock ledges below, then sank deeper and deeper until the clanking became too faint to hear. Back in the world above ground we sailed out into the ocean and enjoyed the sunshine. As soon as we neared land it began to rain and then pour. The usual kabillions of salmon swatted and slapped the water all about. We set our crab trap at the entrance of DeGroff inlet. A deer greeted us as we made our way into anchor. DeGroff inlet is a very nice place, it has a good feel to it as some places do. The weather broke for a few hours and we enjoyed a sunset that turned the sky pink and the spruce trees yellow.

It has been a fantastic day. We cautiously exited treacherous and uncharted Mirror Harbor at low water slack tide. We had a beautiful partly cloudy morning and a close encounter with a giant Humpback whale. There was hardly a breath of wind as we steamed through the intricate channels, narrows, and archipelagos of Chichagof’s west coast. It is a truly awesome place with jagged horn peaks, abandoned gold mines and Indian villages, and salmon leaping everywhere. Slipping into Klag Bay a thick school of salmon swam under the boat, and a fierce-looking pod of sea-lions hunted them nearby. Sea otters, river otters, and seals are also swimming about the bay, and the salmon are everywhere! You will see one leaping on the water anywhere you look. The chart indicated the abandoned town of Chichagof at the head of the bay, an old gold-mining town that pulled $13 million in gold from the mountains. We could see a few buildings from the water, but nothing else was written about the place. Our expedition into the lost city of Chichagof proved fantastic and beyond our wildest expectations! Picking our way through the dense woods and rocky beaches, we discovered a vast boom-town going to rot and returning to the earth. We found endless houses, construction equipment, huge steel machinery and tramway tracks leading everywhere. Everything in the whole town is just sitting there, decaying into the thick layer of moss on the rainforest floor. We even found an old piano in the ground. There was a huge workshed built of enormous timbers and still of sound structure. Saw blades, radiators, and old wooden crates lay about. The crown jewel of our expedition was the discovery that one of the mine shafts goes extremely deep into the mountain. We screamed into the recesses of the tunnel in order to make ourselves known to bears. A long, hollow echo returned, sounding into infinity. The mineshaft was crooked as a lightening bolt which made for hair-raising progress as we made our way around each blind corner. A ways in we encountered water on the floor of unknown depth and had to halt further exploration of the mineshaft. We turned off our flashlights and experienced absolute blackness and the echoing sounds of dripping water from the stalagtites above. My flashlight battery was going dead so we headed back out into the world above ground. There was a strange moment as we stepped out into the hot afternoon air and blinked into the sun. We plan on returning tomorrow with extra batteries, ropes, lifejackets, radios, and spotlights. I cooked up a couple of heaping plates of spinach, rice, onions, bamboo and garlic with peanut-coconut sauce. We ate it with cashews and limes and just stuffed ourselves. After a successful day of exploration we needed the hardy meal. Justin caught a silver salmon after dinner but it leapt out of his net. He is extremely frustrated because he caught the salmon within 15 minutes, and then didn’t get another bite for several hours.

Our food supply is so ample that it is bursting from every locker on the boat. Sometimes we dive deep to stir things up from the bottom and we always find good treasures there. It is amazing how much food one can fit into this boat! Searching for a lost ingredient in the vast food pile is akin to diving into the ball pit at Chuck-E-Cheeze. Almost needless to say, we woke up at a lazy hour and polished off the remainder of the soup. Suddenly the huge mega-yacht across the harbor roared to life and began exiting the lagoon. Justin and I jumped into Modulus and I strained at the oars to gain a front-row seat of the mega-yacht navigating the “dogleg”. I had difficulty bringing my boat through there, and had to see it to believe it. Loud intercoms blared instructions from the skipper, and bow thrusters, stern thrusters and who knows what other expensive mechanics allowed the boat to pivot just inches from the jagged rocks on either side of the boat. The whole scene was ridiculous and we were glad they are gone. We rowed further and wound our way through a maze of channels and over sandy tombolos. Some of the tombolos were quite shallow and we had to get out and walk. I was barefoot and the first to notice that the bottom was swarming with tiny crabs. Millions of them, every square inch! You can scare them by shaking your foot in the water before you plant it. Soon we beached Modulus and took a run along the ocean on a long white-sand beach. We came to a tide pool where several huge crabs were hunting the smaller millions. I’ve never seen crabs move so fast! The hunters would grab the small crabs with their pinchers and stuff them into their mouths, eating them instantly! We waded out into the tidepool to gain the best view of this remarkable phenomenon. Crab after crab was snatched up and crushed in the jaws of the larger ones. I watched until I became tired of the sensation of the crabs burrowing between my toes and under my feet. In the woods we found some huge rusty mining equipment and several old dilapidated shacks. It was a most excellent exploration. Justin found the strangest mushroom we’ve ever seen. It was white and irregular shaped, with irridescent-red liquid oozing from it’s pores. It looked like it was bleeding! Later on in the lazy day we hiked back to the hotsprings. I made the very first entry in the new cabin journal there. It was another perfect ending to a fine day.