Our route and current location: [Note - I forgot to turn on tracking for a while - the track is discontinuous but does pick up later]
https://share.garmin.com/RonRisden
For those following along at home - and at work - the Sail Blog app is just a straight line, giving our anchored locations - where we end for the day. The Garmin track linked above, which starts in Powell River, gives a fairly continuous track of our travels; showing the ins and outs (and backtracking) we are doing. Also you will notice that the dates of the writing may seem a little off. Entries get written when there is a good internet connection and may reflect that date. We will try to start putting the date(s) we are at a specific location into the heading.

We picked up the anchor in Maden Bay, where we had been the only boat overnight, and headed into Wrangell. We often found ourselves the only boat anchored in a cove; more frequently since we had been in the more northern section of the Inside Passage into BC and Alaska. You get used to not having to worry about the swinging room you have so you can let out as much anchor chain as you deem necessary (called scope) and not worry about hitting anyone else.

We motored around the east side of Wrangell Island, past the airport and into the main harbor. We contacted the harbor master on the radio, a usual occurrence when we entered a harbor requesting transient moorage, and were put into the newer harbor, Heritage Harbor, which is just a little south of the main town. We entered the harbor and discovered it was very mixed with commercial fishing vessels docked right alongside recreational boats. The folks on the dock were very friendly, as most everyone had been on our trip, and made us feel right at home. Several folks even offered the use of their vehicles or gave rides into town for shopping or just for lunch over the course of our stay.

We had another side trip to Seattle that needed doing, so Kirsten was the lucky one this time. A day after we got into Wrangell, she took off for Seattle to help our son out in his new business venture. While she was gone I attended to some boat chores, made all the easier by the fact that Wrangell had transformed itself into a large boat repair center. When the logging and fishing went into a slump in SE Alaska, many of the towns dried up. In order to stay afloat, the towns had to transform themselves somewhat from their previous reliance on just timber or fishing. Ketchikan went the cruise liner route - with up to 5 or 6 cruise lines there on any given day in the summer season. Petersburg made it very easy for fish canneries and processing facilities to locate there and so has survived on the fishing end. Wrangell made itself the boat repair center. It has two boat lifts, one the largest in SE Alaska; a large yard, and a great collection of trades people that are able to fabricate or repair almost anything that comes into the yard. It does a large part of the boat work in SE Alaska, and is a year round facility. Of course it wouldn't be Alaska without the long list of do-it-yourselfers as shown in the photo with a boat on a tidal grid - where you pull your boat up at high tide, secure it, and wait for the tide to go out. Since the tide can swing 15 feet or more, the boat can have a fairly deep draft, and you then have few hours to do bottom type work on your boat. But notice - that's not a sailboat!

I put a couple of mast steps on the lower part of the mast to make working on the mainsail easier; scrubbed off the hull; pulled the stove out and cleaned out the recessed area where it lived as well as putting on a new thermo couple for the broiler (it had never worked since we had gotten the boat) and cleaned all the burners; got a local machine shop to fabricate 2 new spare deck fill caps that could not be purchased; pulled the anchor rode out and remarked both the chain and rope for length; and cleaned all the contacts on the anchor windless and switches. The latter had been giving us problems when we would raise the anchor and the majority of issues like that are voltage related. Cleaning the contacts allows for less of a voltage drop and better performance of the windless. Time will tell if it helps us out. All in all, it turned out to be a good maintenance break.