Glacier Visit Accomplished
09 July 2015 | Taku Harbor, AK
Richard
Yesterday morning we left the Tracy Arm anchorage and followed the arm-shaped strait north, then east at the "elbow", a total distance of 20 miles. There are two glaciers at the end, the North Sawyer and South Sawyer glaciers. The south glacier is still a tidal glacier, meaning it terminates over the water and "calves" icebergs directly into the water. Eric, who has been there previously, said there was not as much floating ice yesterday as on his previous visit, but there was still plenty of ice. The obstacles got bigger and more numerous, the closer we got to the glacier.
At the helm, I slowed the boat to a crawl, while Eric with boathook and Shawn with a long fishing gaff stood at the bow. I avoided the larger chunks of ice, but Eric and Shawn were quite busy pushing smaller ice chunks (and if I misjudged a turn, some bigger pieces) out of the way so that we could continue forward. For awhile we followed a path close to the rock cliffs, which another sailboat, ahead of us, had found. But when we turned around to go back, that path had closed up. So we slowly progressed through the middle of the ice flow, finding open spaces in the constantly moving ice, until we were free of it. Only a couple of times did we hear the thud of a heavy hunk of ice against the hull. Eric said that he saw some of Osprey's bottom paint rub off on one chunk. But we maneuvered very slowly, and no harm was done. Three or four small tour boats where competing for space with us, but there was plenty of room for all. After about three hours of careful, slow steering and almost constant pushing with boathook and gaff, we were into the ice and back to the edge of the flow, with lots of photos in our cameras. A large cruise ship arrived just as we were leaving.
We continued on to the north glacier, which is no longer sitting directly on tidal water, but which is still very close to the water and is impressive to see. We were able to approach closer to it than the south glacier. In fact, the only reason we turned around was that we decided we were getting too close for safety, in case a large chunk dropped of and created a big wave. There were no other boats at this glacier.
Our return to the anchorage became a wet one as the clouds began dumping heavy rain on us, and a fog dropped the visibility down. So radar and chartplotter were our guides back to our anchorage.
Today we motored 25 miles to Taku Harbor, where we're tied to the Alaska parks department dock with a half-dozen other boats. We explored the shoreline and the rotting remains of a large cannery. Below the tide line we found large chunks of thin leaf metal, which stumped us until we realized that it must be the remains of large rolls of tin that were used to make cans.
Tomorrow, Juneau.