28 May – Departed Wrangel at midnight thirty and landed at our 3rd port of call in Petersburg at 0400. Awesome boat ride, Ann Marie slept in the chair, while Virgil, Delores, and I watched this 440 foot vessel maneuver through the front observation deck windows, as we sailed north through the Wrangel Narrows.
While underway and looking out the multiple front windows of the ship, those that are still awake are being quiet and enjoying the nighttime scenery. After a few minutes, a ship’s crewmember named Bob, sat next to me. After our introductions and niceties, Bob began to bequeath all his maritime navigational knowledge of this ship, charts, all the way down to cleaning the ship’s bathrooms. Everything Bob said was the gospel truth as he had over 20 years seniority and knows every job on this vessel. Well, once I cyphered through his very articulate bullshit, Bob did convey all his knowledge on this particular passage way to Petersburg, which was very interesting.
Bob described (in painstaking detail) over the next one and half hours of how the Captain and helmsman (the guy steering the boat) were navigating these very narrow and curvy waters. At one point during the voyage, a person stood guard to the very bow of the ship to help the Captain identify obstacles such as logs or stranded boaters. If he saw something in the water he would radio the Captain and the ship would use a super powerful spot light to illuminate the unknow debris.
Nowhere in the world would I ever see any thing like this again, Bob said. So, please take note, what I learned was at 0230 in morning from a nice guy would wouldn’t stop talking.
Wrangel Narrows is a 22 mile long very narrow passage way going north on the western side of Mitkof Island. Petersburg sits at the North west point of the island. It is illuminated by 20 miles of 60 illuminated green and red buoy markers. Red is for the starboard (right hand side) of the ship and green is for the Port side (left side). To the Maritimer’s up here, this straight is called the Christmas Light Alley. As we looked through the windows of the lounge into the tunnel of darkness it was cool to see the red and green lights blinking on and off way in a mesmerizing fashion way off into the distance. It was really amazing to witness this hunk of steel going 20 mph maneuvering with less than 50 yards of clearance between the buoys. Cruise ships are too large to travel this passageway and must go west into open water. Yep that’s it.
Bigfoot and Elkhorn trotted 21 miles south hwy 7 from the ferry terminal to a boondocking site in a US Forestry campground. Level grass sites with a picnic table and fire ring and an out house. As a side note, of course out houses are important when one really needs one (or two), but up here they are community resource used by many. They are clean and stocked with TP, little to no graffiti and well maintained. I digressed. We had our choice of small back-in grass sites as no one was here. How could that be?
This is Memorial Weekend and we thought for sure we would have to hunt a place to bed down Bigfoot and Elkhorn. It was kind of like a Twilight Zone episode of sorts, everything so green and no people, just weird.
We tried to get some sleep but gave up with the daylight streaming thru the trees by 0900. We saw a local man and asked him where everyone was, and why this place was empty and he replied, there is no sunlight here from the huge canopy of Sitka Spruces, everyone want to recreate out in the sun when they can. He said only “drugies’ and people like us use this park. Okay, good for us, we are in the “right” category I think, although not great for our solar systems, but we will be okay.
Virgil knocked on our Bigfoot door at 1100 with two fish in his hands! A rainbow and cut throat trout from the creek running behind us. Both legal at 11 and 1/4 inches long!
Ann Marie and I got dressed, put our wellies on and headed to the creek. Within an hour Ann Marie caught and nice 11-1/4 inch rainbow and I ended the day getting skunked.
This was my first time fly fishing, but the fish were too tired to bite my fly on the end of the hook. We started up the generator and vacuumed sealed the fish fillets and gave to Virgil to freeze.
