Sincerely, Denise

KETCHIKAN TO PRINCE RUPERT (DIXON ENTRANCE CROSSING)

Saturday, July 18^th

One of the dreaded or more stressful days of boating is when we have to do an open water crossing, and today it was Dixon Entrance which is exposed to the Gulf of Alaska. We’d been watching the weather for the past week with apprehension because it just wasn’t looking great for the crossing. The challenge is that you get the swells on the beam (from the side), coupled with whatever wind and tidal action you get for the day, so you just never know until you are out there. Winds were predicted out of the NW and they instead were coming from the SE today so that threw us for a loop, actually it seems par for the course – the conditions are never as forecasted! We set the alarm for 3:45AM – yes – ugh, with the intent of pulling off the dock at 4:00AM, but there was not enough light yet to safely travel, so we had to wait until 4:30AM (insert fingers drumming). Leaving Ketchikan you enter the Tongass Narrows which in our experience is a wind tunnel, and sure enough we had chop right away. We got further out into the journey and it would be smooth one minute then big swells and confused water the next. Confused meaning it is coming from all directions. Just when I was worried it was getting too sporty to continue, it would all of a sudden go flat for awhile. 10 minutes later….all worked up again. And that pattern continued the entire day, which was 10 hours of run time. So it was somewhat of a sloppy crossing but it was tolerable, and never escalated to where we had to bail, thankfully, so it’s great to have that “GATE” behind us. We arrived to no rain or wind in Prince Rupert – what?? It’s always raining and windy here!! As we were docking and securing our lines we heard a giant explosion and saw a puff of smoke onshore behind some buildings and wondered what happened? We quickly found out that a transformer had blown which shut power down on the dock even before we could plug in. Not a big deal, we have a huge battery capacity, and the power was back on later that evening. We later learned it was an unfortunate Raven that landed on the wire and then must have touched something up there that wasn’t grounded – instead it was roasted bird. Or more like exploding bird. And here I thought they were so smart. After a hike to the grocery store for all the produce that we couldn’t bring across the border, we had dinner at the Pub and an early night to bed, I think it was only 7:30 when we shut our eyes – really it was 6:30 Alaska time – which we’ve been on since June 1^st – but now we are back on Seattle time. We've had a wonderful 6 weeks in Alaska and it's hard to believe how fast it has flown!