21 Jul 23

I woke up before 07:00 so I could buy tickets to Bruce Hornsby and the Range, playing at Heights Theater on 25 Oct. We finally got out of bed just before 08:00. About 09:00, we fired up the engine, hauled up the anchor and moved over to the park service dock. Ashley and Terri ran up to the gift shop at the park lodge, while I decanted 10 gallons of diesel from the two jerry cans into the main tank. When they got back to the boat, we got underway just as it started to rain, at 10:10. We had an uneventful motor out of Glacier Bay and across Icy Strait until, about 1.5 N-m NE of Pt. Adolphus (on Chichagof Island), I saw big splashes up ahead. It turned out to be a humpback whale slapping the water with his tail 7 or 8 times. As we drew adjacent to him about 200 m away, we stopped to watch him. He gave us a great show with multiple tail and pectoral fin slaps and 4 or 5 complete body-out-of-the-water breaches, with huge splashes. Terri and Ashley both captured a couple of the breaches on their iPhones. Then, as suddenly as he had appeared, he departed. We carried on to Hoonah, where we tied up at the dock at 15:23. On the way in, we stopped at the fuel dock and bought 44 gallons of diesel and filled up propane tank #2 (the attendant advised me to replace the valve on this tank, as it is getting hard to fill the tank). After we got tied up at the town dock ($40.04 for slip and 30A power), we walked into town. Not much going on in a town of 850 on a day when no cruise ships were in town; thank goodness, as sometimes they have as many as 5 cruise ships (each with as many as 5000 passengers) in a single day. Anyway, we stopped at Icy Strait Brewery and sampled some of the local craft beer - excellent IPA and stout. I walked back to Fisherman’s Daughter, got some take-out blackened halibut tacos for dinner and brought them back to enjoy with another pint at the brew-pub. Then, we went back to the boat, where I disassembled the boat to solve the problem of the engine compartment air exhaust fan not working; it turned out that it was some kind of intermittent electrical fault, after I confirmed that it was not the fan. After an hour of hard labor the boat was back together and I finally got to enjoy my G&T, still serviced by 10,000 year old ice from Johns Hopkins glacier.  

58-06.371’N, 135-26.849’W; Log = 29.6, Sum (2023) = 1712.7 N-m; Eng. hrs = 5.2, Sum = 3385.8