Departing YAK was rather nice, with warm sunshine after all the cold rain. The mountains were gleaming, and the cruise ships were coming and going to tour Yakutat Bay and Disenchantment Bay with it's tidewater glaciers. The wind filled in and I had a lovely wing-in-wing run down through until morning, reaching up to 8 knots boat speed. Some cruise ships came both up and down the coast with me inside my course and the shoreline, while others went outside. It was busy with one even stopping or slowing to enjoy the sunset and take my picture. As my sails were lit up like a lantern by the sun racing horizontally towards the set behind the mountains, and the soft mist just starting to come down made the edges of a rainbow skirting the surface of the sea, I imagine it was a lovely moment for the 1000 or so folks aboard the ship, as well as my tiny little boat.

Motoring in the morning with no wind, changed quickly as I approached Cross Sound and a passing shower turned the canyons, fjords, and glaciers into an engine of 25 knots of wind mostly on my nose. I decided to motor through rather than deal with the a wind shift at every cape and canyon. And approaching my hoped for anchorage outside Elfin Cove, I got a break from the wind and things warmed up quickly. And the smell of cold wind on the water was replaced with the fragrance of the spruce trees. My anchorage was full, however, with an explorer cruise ship loaded with kayaks and tourists taking up the entire spot.

So I carried on, passing through the narrows, and a pair of humpbacks watching their young calf play in the waters under a waterfall with one pectoral coming up, then the other. Then past the haul outs for the sea lions, who's cacophony had nothing to do with my closeness, but rather the social structure of who gets to sit on the rock and who has to stay in the water. A few hundred yards further on, you'd never know they didn't want to be in the water as three sea lions jumped, leapt, and played their way alongside my boat as playful as any porpoise in a marine park show. All the while, in the narrows with shifting currents and hand steering, my camera was out of reach.

But, as I might have said once or twice along the way, "that was cool."