JULY 6, 2022 – KLEWNUGGIT TO BOTTLENECK INLET

We pulled anchor this morning heading south, unsure about where we will end up today, but we are continuing to motor south. It will depend on the weather (which right now is warm and calm, but overcast again), and how we feel. Our options are Butedale, which is a dock tie down but nowhere to go really, an abandoned cannery site that is supposedly going to be redeveloped into a “world class destination” – at least that’s what they said 4 years ago when we stopped in there (but still hasn’t changed much). If you look up Butedale on Google you will see their grand plans. I hope they succeed, it would be nice to have a destination to look forward to between Port McNeill (top of Vancouver Island) and Prince Rupert with groceries and services. Anyway, nothing too exciting there, and being an overcast and rainy day it’s a good day to just run and get some miles behind us. This stretch of the journey doesn’t offer much for us to explore, so may as well keep going. We decided to shoot for Work Bay, a place we’d stayed in past, that’s big enough for one boat to anchor and have swinging room, but when we pulled in there were logs choking the bay, just not safe enough nor desirable to be amongst all that lumber. But…Bottleneck Inlet was just 5 miles slightly to the south, and it is always a nice place to anchor, so that is where we ended up at nearly 6PM, a very long running day. Bottleneck is a beautiful little narrow bay with an even narrower entrance at low tide. With only one other boat in the bay, we had plenty of room. The head of the bay shallows up into mud flats at low tide, so since it was high tide I convinced John to go on a little cruise in the whaler up to the head to investigate. By now the sun was peeking through the clouds, it was 68 degrees outside, which felt really great. The bay got as low as 5’ but we were able to get to the very head which was an outlet for a stream – I searched for bears, as always, but none visible. I have been reading so much about brown bears on this trip John thinks I am obsessed. Maybe a little, over and over again in the books I’ve been reading (all nonfiction, personal accounts of individuals that have encountered many bears back into the 1800s) I find the common theme so interesting how humans finally learned that 98% of the time if you speak softly to the bears when encountered rather than acting erratically or yelling at them, they choose to avoid you, but if you agitate them – they may indeed attack. Of course, there’s always the bear that is just plain angry that day or looking for a fight, and you never know which one you will come across, so there is that to worry about. But if you surprise them, which is my fear when hiking through the woods or grasses, they aren’t apt to turn the other cheek so to speak. Back in the 1800s and early 1900s the government sought to rid the country of bears and wolves, as they were “savage beasts, incongruous with human settlement” and it was quite successful in the lower 48 of doing just that. Roosevelt, although a committed bear hunter, was responsible for setting aside millions of acres in Alaska for preservation and conservation. Admittedly partly because he wanted to make sure there was still a bear hunting population for himself and other hunters, but he also saw the benefit to the revenue derived from tourism; people willing to shell out the bucks to see bears in the wild. Today the brown bears are protected in several areas in Alaska, such as Katmai National Park near Kodiak, Pack Creek near Juneau, Anan near Wrangell, and many others. Bear hunting is still legal outside of these protected areas but a permit costs a bunch of money, and the AK Fish and Game folks monitor things pretty tightly up here. Hence the story in my earlier post about the enforcement team that tracked us down in a cove in Baranof Island in May, wondering if we were bear hunters. They patrol the shorelines. Anyway, I digress. I do love the bears and wolves.

Tonight’s dinner hack: was trying to figure out something quick and easy to work some crab into our dinner tonight. I have a recipe for Crab Bucatini with lemon/caper sauce, but that seemed like too much work. Then I remembered I had a small Beecher’s Mac & Cheese in the freezer that had been with us since we left. BINGO! Cooked that up and then mixed in fresh crab at the end, reheated 5 minutes (the cold crab cooled the mac instantly) and served with some steak and salad. That’s a big dinner for us, living large! Can’t do that every day. Yum.

No pics today!