9:00 AM

We were in no hurry to get going this morning. The current we have to deal with in the Prince of Wales pass does not turn against us until early this afternoon.

The anchorage here at Fox Farm is completely calm this morning with the surrounding hills reflected in on the surface of the water. I took some photos.

The only other occupants of this cove are two mother otters with their pups, who are swimming around about 50 yards from the boat, and a small aluminum fishing boat anchored very close to shore. The fishing boat arrived late yesterday afternoon, after we were anchored, and the crew was cleaning fish off the stern. Its a cute little aluminum cabin cruiser with two big outboards on the back. It looks very suitable for overnight fishing trips in this part of the world.

We are heading over to a place called Icy Bay where Tiger glacier is located. From the descriptions in our cruising guide it sounds like there is a lot of ice floating in that bay and that sometimes you have to wait for the tide to carry it out or compress it back against the glacier before you can leave.

Our plan is to cruise around Prince William sound in a clockwise direction so we don't have to backtrack .

10:30 AM

We are motoring north with the current boosting our speed to over 7 kts. The name of the passage we are in is Prince of Wales Passage that runs between Evans Island, to Starboard, and Bainbridge Island to port. We are going through the narrow part of the passage right now and the current is occasionally grabbing the boat and turning it as much as 30 degrees off course. A minute or so later we see the opposite effect. The autopilot corrects to the magnetic heading it was told to hold but that is not always the same as the course we want to hold to head in the right direction to avoid hazards along the shore.

There are little white caps on the water as the current opposes the wind.

We just passed a humpback whale feeding in the current.

We are now going almost 8 kts over the bottom.

Another whale is crossing toward the boat in the current. He is going very slowly. We snapped a bunch of photos of him as he turned and starting swimming parallel to us only a couple of boat lengths away. It has to be our closest whale encounter besides the whale watching trip we did in Bahia Magdalena in Mexico.

According to the rules we are supposed to cut our engine when we get within 100 yards of a whale but that does not make much sense in our current situation. If we were to cut our engine the current would immediately change our course and possible take us closer to the whale who had certainly already taken our speed and course into account when he changed course to move parallel to us. It was pretty obvious that the whale was aware of us and took the appropriate action to avoid our interrupting his dinner any more than necessary. Holding our course and speed seemed like the appropriate thing to do. The whale seemed to be more better able to assess the situation than a lot of powerboaters we have had to deal with over the years.

We passed Squirrel Cove on our way past the end of Evans Island. There was a boat in there with an AIS signal that said it was doing a crab survey. He just kept steering back and fourth over a 0.3 mile stretch of the shore.

11:30 AM

We are now toward the north end of Prince of Wales passage and our speed is starting to drop (5.1 kts) as the boost from the current is becoming weaker. The passage is getting wider and we are getting closer to the turn of the tide.

I have been watching our new broadband radar display was we motored up this passage. It is really quite impressive for the short range detection of objects. I took some screen shots of our chart and of the radar display that Ill post when we get internet. The radar was able to pick out tiny power boats anchored near granite cliffs and also showed a cluster of rocks in good detail even when we were only a hundred feet from them. Our old radar would have completely ignored something that close to the boat. If we were navigating in the fog that difference is radar performance would be important.

I have also been impressed with how well the radar distinguished between sea scatter and small boats when we were crossing in front of all those fiords yesterday. The display would be completely black except for the boats that would occasionally pass in front of us.

3:30 PM

We are anchored in Tiger Bight in Icy Bay.

As we approached Icy Bay (about 3 miles out) Shawn said we could sure tell it was the weekend with all the boats out in the sound.

As we got closer it became very obvious that all the little white things on the water were not boats. They were floating ice. The only other boats we saw were two kayakers picking their way through the ice and on their way out of Icy Bay with such determination that they must have just learned that Obama Care included psychiatric care that they seemed to be in need of.

The ice was confined to a 2 mile area about ¾ of the way up the bay from Tiger Glacier at its head. Once we were through the ice the way ahead cleared again.

As we worked our way toward our anchorage we had to abandon using the autopilot and actually go outside, where we could see the ice, and steer. If the dingy were not upside down on the foredeck this "outside" silliness would not have been necessary.

Shawn got a picture of me steering in my foul weather jacket, with my watch hat on, and with my insulated sailing gloves that were seeing their first real use since I bought them 11 years ago.

I found that my +1.0 diopter polarized sun glasses really made it a lot easier to see the chunks of ice as we motored past them. There were very few that looked big enough to possibly cause any problems for the boat but we are not going to take any chances this far from civilization.

We were able to steer among the patches of ice and only heard a couple little ones hit the hull.

In addition to the stunning view of Tiger Glacier at the head of Icy Bay we motored past Nassau fiord where Chenega Glacier meets the water. It is a spectacular site with the translucent end of the glacier facing out into the fiord and lots of floating ice moving out of the fiord and into Icy Bay.

Our cruising guide says that its possible to walk across the moraine at the face of Chenega Glacier at low tide.

I think we have gotten to the part of this Alaska cruise where we wont be in a hurry to leave spots like this when we stumble upon them.

We took a lot of ice pictures today and also pics of the glaciers. Ill need to get them onto the computer so I can keep them sorted by location. I'm sure that, sooner or later, its going to be hard to identify which glacier picture is which.

When we were in New Zealand I made a few comments, on the blog, that got me a bit of pushback from some people who disagreed with me. Some were Kiwis and some were Americans. I had said that the scenery on the South Island of NZ was like British Columbia in miniature and that I thought the Kiwis oversold the place.

Had I seen Alaska first I would have been even less charitable in my comparison.

The only way I can think of comparing NS scenery to Alaska is to use the analogy of those topography models we sometimes see in museums where a National Park or Island is represented by a 3D model that you can walk around and see the layout of a place.

New Zealand is like a museum model of Alaska.

For many years, after my Dad died, my Mom worked for Holland America Lines on a contract basis. As a result she went from being an "Ozzie and Harriet" stay at home Mom to one of the most well traveled people I have ever known.

Her jobs, with Holland America, had taken her around the world 5 times, through the med and to the north cape. She also worked some of the cruises out of New York to Bermuda and the Bahamas but dealing with New Yorkers on a regular basis cured her wanting anything to do with those assignments.

The only cruises she would sign up for, without giving it a second thought, were the ones between Vancouver and Alaska. She could not get enough of this part of the world.

This was in the days before the internet and modern electronics so she had to send us cassette tapes with her recordings of whales and seals. Because she was a crew member, who could influence passengers shopping and buying decisions, she got to go on all the side trips for free. She flew in light planes and landed on glaciers.

I am quickly developing an appreciation for why she felt the way she did about Alaska. I'll have to admit I was a bit skeptical about any place that could elect Sarah Palin its Governor but now I understand that the human presence has very little to do with why visiting Alaska should be on everyone's bucket list.

Anchoring was easy enough. We found a 40 foot spot to drop the anchor. I think we dragged if into 60 feet before it grabbed but we backed down on it hard and it is holding. Since the weather forecast does not have any intense weather in the forecast for the next few days and this anchorage is well protected on the sides from which strong winds would come if they occurred, we think we are well secured for the duration of our stay here.

There are a couple of anchorages in this area that look really interesting. There is one in front of Chenega Glacier that should be Ok for a short while in the daytime and then another behind a little island, just outside of Nassau Fiord, that looks nice and snug and where you are supposed to be able to see seal pups and, occasionally, killer whales feeding on them.

The length of our route today was just about perfect. The batteries had just completed charging when we got here and its early enough in the afternoon that we are not tired. There is plenty of light left in the day to give us lots of beautiful vistas for our viewing pleasure.

After we got anchored the cabin was pretty chilly from the doors and hatch from the pilot house being open for a while. I turned up our little propane heater but within 20 minutes we had to turn it down again. We are expecting the propane tank to be empty pretty soon but want to run it dry so we can weigh it and establish a tare weight for the tank.

Tonight I am going to charge the batteries for our video camera. There are a lot of things about this place that just dont come across in our still photos.

Shawn is making meatloaf for supper. He found a recipe that uses horseradish and sounds really yummy. We are both developing a fondness for recipes that involve using the oven for long periods of time.