Ketchikan to Petersburg

The theme on this leg of our cruise was bears. In all three stops along Behm Canal, Yes Bay, Fitzgibbon Cove and Walker Cove, we saw brown bears on the beach grazing on grass or plowing the tide flats for morsels.

In Walker Cove we were able to snag the USFS provided mooring buoy and get great views of a mother and her cub on the beach.  We really got our money’s worth when a male bear came onto the other end of the beach and proceeded to chase the other two off.

While in Walker Cove, we were joined on the buoy by Seaducktress, a trawler from the same boatyard in China as ours.  The weather was stunning so we had happy hour on our flybridge and watched the nature show taking place around us.

While paddling in Yes Bay, as we were returning to the boat from a kayak paddle, we saw a bear on the beach a little over a quarter mile away.  As I was watching, we saw it approach the shore then enter the water.  Soon it was just a head bobbing along in the bay.  We reboarded our boat and watched the bear swim across the bay, passing about 150 yards off of our stern.

We did some crabbing and prawning along the way and were successful enough to put a number of meals on the table.  Our crabbing was hampered by the refusal of the outboard on our dinghy to start after having worked fine a number of times already this cruise.  The problem was resolved while we visited our friends Pete and Brenda who have a cabin on a bay 10 miles NE of Ketchikan.  Pete successfully diagnosed the problem as old gas and fixed it by replacing all of the old gas from the system with fresh.

Our prawning has been mediocre compared to last year.  We haven’t had any stellar hauls of prawns and have been plagued by small Dungeness crabs climbing into the pots and scaring the prawns off.  We even had a small octopus in one of our pots take a ride to the surface when we hauled it up.

From here we’ll work our way to Sitka stopping at some of our favorite spots. Besides the crab and prawn traps, Marcia will probably be dropping a hook in the water to try her luck fishing.