Sincerely, Denise

HOONAH TO EIGHT FATHOM BIGHT, PORT FREDERICK INLET

Saturday, June 20^th

I forgot to mention in yesterday's post that the sun came out! We had glorious sunshine all day yesterday and today is shaping up to be the same. Was 70 degrees at 9AM this morning as we set out for a walk on the new breakwater trail that circles the harbor. It leads to the little island where the cemetery is located, but is gated off to general public access, which I totally understand. There is a cruise ship terminal a few miles north of town on “Icy Strait Point” where they’ve built a little tourist village for the cruisers. There’s a gondola and zip line, restaurants and shops, but some of the passengers make their way into Hoonah for the shops and services. There’s a carving shed where you can watch the master carvers creating totem poles but it was closed when we were there. There’s a brewery “Icy Strait Brewery” that is only open from 5PM-8PM unless the cruise ship is in town then they are open all day. Today’s cruise was short, only an hour and a half as we made our way deep into Port Frederick Inlet to a place called Eight Fathom Bight. The mountains were gorgeous on either side of us and the wind was coming from behind us making for a smooth and warm cruise. We deployed the anchor, rafted up with UnforgetAbell and prepared for some crabbing! The commercial crabbers have their pots littered in the bay, along the shoreline, so Connie and I are hoping for a good haul. The scenery is stunning and the shoreline looks bear friendly so we are hoping for some bear sightings today as we explore.

Since our arrival the wind has steadily picked up making the water slosh between the boats like a steady washing machine. After artfully deploying crabpots amongst the other 50 commercial crab pots in the bay, Connie and I decided to explore the farther reaches of the inlet as it was still a beautiful sunny day, just breezy. We went back to the very head of the inlet over a bar that showed up blue on the garmin, which means shallow. Shallow it was not, it was 50’ and once back inside we were in pristine calm conditions, no wind and lots of sun, so we immediately dubbed it Miami Beach! We cruised the shoreline looking for bears (none) whilst plotting just how to convince the boys we should pull anchor and relocate into this back bay. On the way back out we once again did recon on the “blue bar” to make sure the depths were reliable and couldn’t find anything more shallow than 39 feet. The negotiation back at the boat was easy because we were quite exposed where we were and boys didn’t want to listen to waves slapping the hull all night either. Once relocated, we had Miami Beach for about an hour when suddenly the wind funneled over the lowest spot in the hills and our bay suddenly got all whipped up! OK, maybe it will subside, we hoped, and went on about our day. Meanwhile, John decided to throw his halibut pole over the side of the tender, which was still tied to the mothership. First catch was some sort of bullhead, dogfish looking thing, no idea what it was but unfortunately he swallowed the entire hook and bait, so his fate was sealed. John reset his bait and hook and back down it went. 30 minutes later….a barn door was on the line, woah, took John about 10 minutes to get it to the surface to see an enormous halibut, probably 45lbs. It took John and Greg to gaff it and drag it onboard where it violently flailed on the deck of the tender. Halibut can be very dangerous as they are super strong and can actually cause a lot of damage like breaking equipment or arms and legs. Eventually it expired and John was able to fillet. Needless to say, we are set on halibut for the season. To add more magic to our day, all of a sudden John saw a whale spout in the distance at the entrance to our bay! It turned out to be a humpback whale, and it came right next to our boats for a couple spouts then disappeared into the farthest back bay, never to be seen again, but Greg snapped some great pictures. By now it was too windy to go fetch crab pots, and we had a lot of work ahead of us to process the halibut, so that consumed our evening. But wait, there’s more. The aforementioned wind was still pummeling us and our anchor was slipping. Ever so slowly over the course of the evening, we were blown backwards towards the mouth of the bay. At around 9PM, John pulled anchor and maneuvered both boats back to our original position, and resigned that he would be up all night on anchor watch, and it blew….gusts up to 40 at times, it was a rocky night and again we slowly slipped anchor until finally in the middle of the night the wind died off. I slept like a baby but John slept intermittently on the pilot house settee, eventually slipping into bed around 3AM when things were again calm. What a crazy transition from calm to gale.