(Above photo is of Baranof Warm Springs next to the top of the falls. No one is in it though because after two days of rain, the hot springs was quite cool)

Sorry about the length of time between Reflections. I started this almost a month ago and seem to have had an absence of writing ambition for a spell. Although it is dated 6/21 when I started it, the completion was actually on July 18.

Leaving Sitka, we started up Peril Strait to spend a night in Baby Bear Cove. I continue to wonder how some of these places got their names. Another night in Peril Strait at Appleton Cove rewarded us with two nice sized Dungeness crabs and some freshly caught rockfish. Delicious diner that night. The next day we entered Chatham Strait. This is one very large body of water stretching about 120 miles north to south and an average of about eight miles across. By my feeble calculations, five Puget Sounds could fit within Chatham Strait. Enroute to our next anchorage at Ell Cove we ran across a large group of commercial fishing boats called purse seiners at work. We were on schedule to arrive at our destination early in the afternoon so took some time to watch how these boats worked and it was educational and interesting. We already knew that salmon are the primary target for purse seiners and assume that electronic fish finders are used to locate concentrations of the delectable delights. They all carry, or tow while working, heavy, sturdy, high powered skiffs. When a school of salmon is located, the skiff holds the end of the net, while the big boat runs out a few hundred yards to pay out all of the net. The net has a continuous run of floats at the top and lead weights on the bottom. Once all of the net is in the water, the skiff and big boat head towards one another to make a giant circle of the net, hopefully around the school of salmon that may or may not have decided to hang around waiting to be caught. When they come together, the skiff hands off his end of the net to the big boat and the hydraulic winches go to work. Lines at the bottom of the net are pulled to close it like a drawstring purse while the top with all of the floats passes over a giant pulley making the circle of floats ever smaller. Anticipation builds as the circle closes and the last of the net is hauled onto the boat. A good set can hold several thousand pounds of fish worth quite a few dollars. We watched a few sets resulting in meager amounts of fish, wondering if the wholesale price for salmon would have even paid for the fuel consumed to catch them. Maybe they were just practicing for the huge salmon runs to come later in the season.

The next destination, Baranof Warm Springs, was on our must-do list. The setting is nice. Warm Springs Bay extends about two miles from Chatham Strait to the head of the bay where it narrows down to a large cove. A public float, capable of holding maybe eight boats of our size, sits in the cove. When the place is busy, boats are encouraged to raft up together. This means that a boat will tie to a boat already tied to the dock. At times, especially when the purse seiners were in as many as twenty boats were at the dock with the seiners sometimes rafted four deep. About one-half mile inland from the cove lies Baranof Lake, which sits in a large bowl created by 2,000-foot high mountains that surround it. During our hike up to the lake, we watched as several fly fishermen landed small trout with nearly every cast. The river draining the lake falls several hundred feet creating a wide 100-foot plus high waterfall at the head of the cove. So much water comes from the waterfall that associated currents make docking and undocking from the public float a bit of a tricky operation. Warm Springs Bay is centrally located, almost equidistant from all of the major cities in southeast Alaska, so the commercial fisherman use it as a hang out while waiting for openings in the fisheries for which they hold permits or just to stay overnight. We were there for a few days and had the opportunity to watch many of these seasoned boatmen have real difficulty making soft landings and departures from the float. My anxiety about our eventual departure grew daily.

The big draw is the hot sulpher laden water that comes bubbling out of the ground. It appeared to us that the source is alongside the upper part of the river where some of it is directed into pools that have been enhanced by short walls made of rocks cemented together. Hot water trickles from one pool into the next lower one. This makes for a kind of temperature control, as water in the lower pool is a bit cooler. The setting of the pools is quite spectacular as they are directly adjacent to the roaring river at the top of the waterfall. While soaking in the hot water, you see and hear the large waterfall only a few feet away. Alongside the pathway lie several different runs of black poly pipe that carry hot water down to the boardwalk along which several buildings are situated on pilings above the cove. One of the buildings is a public bathhouse. This is a cool place. Three different rooms with locking doors contain very large and deep tubs. The tubs are big enough that two people can sit facing each other in shoulder high water with legs fully stretched out. Large windowless openings face out with an expansive view of the cove and waterfall. There are curtains, which pull across the openings if modesty dictates. One tub has only barely warm water, the second has very warm water and the third has hot water. Signs in each room explain the procedure. When done bathing or soaking, pull the plug to drain the tub and use the brush to scrub the tub. Replace the plug, take away everything that you brought and prop the door open when you leave. The system works as we found the tubs full of clean water in a clean tub every time we went to use them. There were a few drawbacks. The rotten egg smell of sulpher permeates the air around both the pools and the tubs. The pools by the waterfall had some algae on the rocks and accumulations of organic debris in the bottom. Moving around in the pools would stir little clouds of debris that settled back to the bottom after awhile. These things really did little to detract from our enjoyment. We ended up with a cool procedure. First hike the half-mile to the pools and spend as much time as we liked soaking in the naturally hot water in the completely natural setting next to a waterfall. Hike back down the trail and rinse off in the very clean water of the tubs, then back to the boat for some rehydration. The weather was crummy, with lots of rain. Gale force winds were blowing out in Chatham Strait, which kept us lingering a little longer at Baronof Warm Springs than we had intended, but the opportunity to enjoy one of Mother Nature's special offerings made our stay well worth the extra time. We would definitely return if the chance occurred.

The weather was a little iffy as we motored about 20 miles south and entered Red Bluff Bay. This bay is also on the east side of Baranof Island and is named for a very large treeless red bluff at the entrance. Two 1,000-foot high walls line both sides of the bay, another delightful fiord. We anchored at the head of the bay and counted 14 waterfalls. That night in planning our next day's travel we faced decision time. Three options were available. We could continue south down Chatham Strait for another three or four days. There were some appealing anchorages along this route, but the southern end of Chatham Strait opens up into the Gulf of Alaska. The weather forecast was calling for relatively high winds with eight to ten-foot seas and we would then have a long trip in those conditions across notoriously nasty Dixon Entrance. Option two would have us cross Chatham Strait and travel Frederick Sound back to Petersburg, a wonderful small down that we visited while on our way north. It would have been nice to revisit Petersburg but that would have had restricted us to traveling areas that we had already seen. We were left with option three. Instead of going to Petersburg, we would cross Chatham Strait, briefly enter Frederick Sound, and then hang a right towards the infamous Rocky Pass. According to our guidebook, Rocky Pass is fraught with a multitude of dangers, swift currents, sharp turns, very narrow spots with rocks, reefs and shoal areas awaiting us if we deviated just slightly from the correct route. It has only been in recent years that this passage was surveyed and had navigation markers put in place. However, it has been done and we talked to folks who have successfully traveled this route. We went to a nice little anchorage right at the north entrance of Rocky Pass. We shared this spot with an oyster farm and had the good fortune to be offered a few dozen very fresh specimens by the proprietor. These may have been the sweetest oysters we have ever eaten and are marketed under the name of Rocky Pass Oysters. After carefully evaluating the tide tables and charts, we had a relatively precise idea of when to leave to minimize the effect of currents and of all the potential hazards, their locations and when to make the turns. Despite the anxiety, it turned out to be a smooth trip through beautiful groups of islands.

We had traversed Rocky Pass in order to return to Ketchikan for refueling and provisioning (at US prices), while traveling through new-to-us areas and were rewarded. We stopped at the very small town of Coffman Cove. The weather was nice and is our custom on such days after another safe landing we popped the tops on a couple of cold beverages. While sipping away, three men approached our boat. They had seen us enter the harbor while returning from a days fishing and were inquisitive about the boat and our lifestyle. A nice conversation ensued and ended with them giving us several nice salmon fillets. Next task was to visit the harbormaster and settle up with payment for our moorage. A sign on the office said closed until further notice; so we continued on too walk through town. Another of our customs is to stop at a local pub. There, we can usually strike up a conversation, get a feel for the locale, and find out about local happenings. Things were a little slow when we walked in and our conversation was limited to the barmaid and a sixtyish year old woman with too much makeup. We discovered that, like many places up here, the town had a previous history of logging and fishing, both of which have suffered declines in the past few decades. Enough people liked the place to continue living there. A few gill netters still make a living from the sea and a few "lodges" have opened to service people from out of the area on sport fishing vacations, like the men who gave us the salmon fillets. The fishing lodges in Coffman Cove were a little different than we have seen elsewhere. Take a few single and doublewide trailers, randomly string them together, build a large covered porch, and hang a sign with a name followed by the words "fishing lodge." We learned that the only pizza place in town was a take-and-bake located in the library. Eventually, the pub filled with a variety of folks whom I can only describe as real characters. The owner walked in with a brilliant white cockatiel on his shoulder. The bird ended up on the sill of a large bay window and provided all of the patrons with entertaining antics. Two spacey middle-aged sisters from Whidbey Island, Washington were camping their way through southeast Alaska, travelling via the Alaska Ferry system and hitching rides wherever possible. They told us that the only public showers in the area were at the RV park where they were currently camped along with two chainsaw wood carvers. Then there was the logger-fisherman-house builder-mechanic who grew up in the next bay over in a home built log house with no electricity, hand pumped water and an outhouse. I was really intrigued when two women sat next to me at the bar and immediately asked for the crayons. Upon receiving said writing instruments they proceeded to write a lewd poem complete with graphics on a dollar bill for posting on a wall behind the bar along with about 200 other similarly adorned dollar bills. The place was getting noisy and our conversations were going great when a series of explosions filled the air. Upon noticing our worried expressions the locals told us that this is just the local fireworks vender announcing that he is at his shed and open for business. We were getting hungry and the prospect of a pizza was enticing. It really seemed a little odd that we had to hurry up to get our pizza before the library closed. Coffman Cove was an unusual and interesting place

Our next and last stop before Ketchikan was Myers Chuck. I still have no idea how the word chuck relates to a place. This was another intriguing place. The small cove had a public dock (meaning free in Alaska) about 250 feet long. One side of the bay to the north had two or three small islands that separated it from the back chuck, a narrow inlet that stretched inland for maybe one mile. The south side had a low narrow rocky stretch of land that allowed a really fine view of large islands in the distance. There were maybe 15 homes around the bay visible to us from the dock. Some were solidly on land, some were built on top of rocks surrounded by water and some were anchored on land, but stretched out over the beach (or water depending on the tides) on top of piers. The few small islands on the north side of the bay had homes along with several outbuildings. It had the feel of a place that had been settled by some previous incarnation of hippies. There is no place to buy groceries or hardware, but there is a post office, zip code 99903. The Postmistress comes across the bay in her skiff each afternoon to take cinnamon bun orders for delivery at seven the following morning. While I was doing some boat work, Kris took a walk. She made me a little nervous when she came back and said, "I really like this place. I think I could live here." Some local residents were on the dock and gave us a history of the place and some of the challenges of living there. They pointed to one of the small islands on the north side of the bay and told us that although not let listed, the island and all of the buildings would soon be for sale. Oh Boy! I finally walked the trails with Kris. Foot trails are the local equivalent of roads. The main trail winds around between the houses on the east shore with quirky works of art popping up here and there. A wooden shed contains the fire and first aid station. It also serves as the book and DVD exchange. Another nice shop type building wears a sign that reads "Meyers Chuck Lumber Mill and Rod Club." Outside, the shop sits next to a slick arrangement whereby logs can be floated, at high tides to a ramp. The logs are winched up the ramp onto the bed of a bandsaw lumber mill. Stacks of recently milled cedar lumber sat nearby. Later in the day, we took a kayak tour of the bay and the back chuck where we paddled around the island that would soon be for sale. Wow! There were a few nice sheds, a house in real nice condition, a guest house, a huge shop/storage building built over the water on pilings and an excellent dock on the other side of the island in super protected back chuck. Kris and I daydreamed together on where we would live in the winter, as this would be an awesome summer home. It was a fun daydream. Floatplanes come and go to the dock. There is a small wooden storage cabinet near where they tie to the dock. A carved wooden sign on it reads "Meyers Chuck Freight Terminal #1." There is an attitude surrounding this place that feels good. I agree with Kris.

Then back to Ketchikan, which marks the end of our adventure in Alaska.

Kirk