9:30 AM

We weighed anchor and started up the College Fiord to see the glaciers. Today will be about 42 miles of sightseeing up and back down to an anchorage called Golden which was once the sight of some of the gold prospecting in this part of the world.

About 15 miles up College Fiord is a branch off to the right called Yale Arm. At the head of College Arm is Yale Glacier.

Just think how much more impressive our resumes are going to be after we finish our tour and can add Yale and Harvard.

The East side of the the fiord has all the glaciers named after men's ivy league colleges. The west side is given over to glaciers named for women's colleges like Smith, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, Wellesley, Barnard, and Holyoke.

I wonder, if Harriman had made his voyage of discovery up here today, would he have named the glaciers after something more contemporary, Like Ninja Turtles or Boy Bands.

10:30 AM

It's going to be sunny when we get up to the head of the fiord. There are so many glaciers on the sides of the fiord that Shawn commented that this must be where all the cruise ship lines take their promotional photos.

Weather reports have consistently reported better weather in the more northerly parts of Prince William Sound. I think this is because the mountains keep the lows from having much effect this far north. The blustery and rainy weather seems to be concentrated along the lower part of the sound adjacent to the Gulf of Alaska.

Now that we are getting closer to the entrance to Yale Arm we are starting to see more brash ice. Shawn is up on deck with the wireless remote and conning us through the ice. We put the dingy on deck this morning since we worried about it getting damaged by collisions with sharp chunks of ice when we were towing it yesterday. Its harder to spot ice from the pilot house when the dingy is on the foredeck.

There seem to be more critters sitting on the ice up here than in the other fiords we have visited. Right now Shawn is trying to maneuver us past a chunk with a bald eagle sitting on it. He thinks he might be able to get a photo of the ice chunk with the eagle with a glacier in the background.

When we get up to the face of Harvard glacier we will be as far north (60 16.329 N) as we will get. We thought we had completed our high latitude sailing experiences when we rounded Tasmania a couple of years ago but this will add 20 degrees to our record from that passage.

11:00 AM

Yesterday afternoon the propane tank finally hit empty and I swapped it out for a fresh one. Based on weights of the full and empty tank I figured that we use somewhere between 1.6 and 3.5 pounds of propane per day. We got nine days out of our last 20 lb tank which says we averaged 2.2 lbs per day. Obviously the 3.5 lb days were the ones where we ran the heater a lot. For comparison, a 20 lb tank of propane usually lasts us around 1.5 to 2 months in the tropics. If we were to live here and do extended cruising here we would have to add a diesel heater

We are now in the ice field outside the entrance to Yale Arm. It is made up of lots of little pieces (1-2 feet across) and there is no way to avoid them all. Shawn in up on the cabin top steering us through so we avoid the big chunks and had me slow the engine so we are not hitting them too hard. We are only moving 1.9 kts with the engine at idle speed.

I am sure glad we decided to pull the dingy out of the water.

I hope the satellite photos that are on our position report pages were taken on a clear day so you can see all the glaciers around us if you check our position reports. Ill drop a few extra position reports as we work our way up the fiord.

12:00 Noon

Shawn is still scampering around up on the foredeck switching between steering the boat, getting lots of photos and checking out the wildlife with the binoculars

Im in the pilot house watching the electronic charts, typing the blog and, most importantly, making sure the heater is working properly.

12:45 PM

The ice was getting thicker and we decided that we would not really see much more if the pushed farther toward Yale Glacier so we turned around and headed down Yale Arm so we could have a shot at getting up toward Harvard Glacier in College Fiord.

There were a lot of critters on the ice up near the glacier. It looked like it was mostly seals. The ice was to thick to let us close enough for photos so we had to content ourselves with looking at them through the binoculars.

There have been a couple of sightseeing planes fly over the glacier in the past few minutes. It would be nice if someone got some pics of the boat and sent them to us like Linda did from the tourist boat in the Panama Canal.

We are about ¼ of a mile off College Point which marks the boundary between Yale Arm and College Fiord. There is a rock shown on the chart just off the point and we see a big chunk of ice in just about to the right position for it to be aground on the rock.

1:45 PM

We only got within 3 ½ miles of the face of Harvard Glacier before the ice got to thick and we decided to back off for safety's sake.

We got hailed by the ?sightseeing plane I mentioned a few paragraphs ago. It turned out it was a NOAA plane doing surveys of marine mammals. They were photographing all the harbor seals we had been watching through the binoculars. He said they were calibrating some new camera equipment. He did not ask for an email address so I guess he did not take any pictures of us that he was willing to send us. Its probably not acceptable to take pictures of yachts from government aircraft unless, of course, the yacht were to belong to a member of congress or a large political campaign donor.

Now we are motoring back down College Fiord and heading for an anchorage for tonight. Its about. Its 14 miles to the golden anchorage and at our current speed we should be there by 4:45. We will have to decide if we want to push on bit farther to shorten our trip tomorrow. Tomorrows route is only about 25 miles so there is not much point in pushing hard today but about an hour farther there is an anchorage where they say you can see black bears feeding on salmon at this time of year.

As we motor past the Wellsely Gracier we can see a small power boat in the cove with a giant kayak on top. The kayak looks like it is longer than the boat. The cove in front of the glacier is supposed to be relatively ice free because there is a new terminal moraine right in front to the glacier that keeps the calved ice from getting out except on very high tides. Unfortunately the cove is quite shallow and we dont want to risk going in there.

Lots of otters here in groups.

4:30 PM

We are motoring through the area where College Fiord and Harriman Fiord come together and it is full of groups of otters . There are hundreds of them. I think they are sleeping. When we pull close they become alert, watch us and then dive if we get to close.

5:15

Anchored in fisherman's cove in the West end of Esther Passage.

This was an incredible day with the most stunning scenery either of us has ever seen. It was amazing that we had this all to ourselves with the exception of the NOAA plane that flew over us for a few minutes, and hundreds of otters and seals.