Inside Passage, 1994

Humpback Whale Inside Passage, 1994
May 2 - June 5, 1994

Spring passed quickly, and we left May 2 for our boat trip up the Inside Passage. We drove the truck and empty boat trailer to Haines and took the ferry to Prince Rupert to reunite with our boat, which we'd left there in February. As soon as we launched it, the motor died. We pulled it out again and discovered that there was a lot of water in the gas. In the end we replaced the motor with a more powerful one. This meant a week's delay before we could set out, but it was a good decision.

We left Prince Rupert May 14. We raced the sunset to Dundas Island and lost. The rollers got bigger and bigger as the wind rose and the light faded. At one point we passed near a spectacular lighthouse on a rocky prominence with waves crashing against the cliffs. It was too dark to get a photo.

By the time we rounded the north tip of Dundas Island, it was almost completely dark. We followed the shoreline toward where the chart showed a deep sheltered bay. We were concerned that we may not be able to find the narrow entrance in the dark. By now we knew we should have stayed in Prince Rupert until morning.

Then we saw one of the most welcome sights of our lives, an anchored sailboat just inside the narrow bay. It guided us to safety. We pulled up near it, anchored, and slept an exhausted sleep.

The next morning we proceeded across Dixon Entrance into Alaska. We stopped at Metlakatla, Ketchikan, Wrangell, Petersburg, and Juneau on our way north to visit schools and share Susan's books. The weather was glorious. We anchored in hidden coves and hiked along beaches at low tide. Once while underway we saw splashes in the distance. Hundreds upon hundreds of dall porpoise were swimming right toward us. Another time porpoises chased the boat and swam along with us, right under the hull!

We explored fiords and went through Ford's Terror, the mouth of a fiord that is so narrow and shallow that when the tide changes the current can be as much as 17 knots with overflows! It looked like a whitewater river during the tide change. We entered at high slack tide into a private wilderness with sheer rock cliffs towering thousands of feet above the water.

Extreme tides floated icebergs as large as ships. We came upon a humpback whale floating and turning over and over near a cliff. As we drifted and tried to take his picture, he swam toward us and surfaced to look at us with one huge eye. He dove under our boat and came up on the other side, displaying his flukes before diving deep beneath the icy water. We got one good picture of him (see photo).

As we continued north, we heard loud animal sounds. We rounded a corner and cut the motor to drift right by a sea lion rookery. Amazingly, the dog wasn't interested at all in the sea lions. He spent most of his time staring into the water. He's the only avid fisherman in our family and will do almost anything to catch a fish. In Juneau, Dennis caught several minnows for bait and left them swimming in a five-gallon bucket. Goldie discovered them and went "bobbing for minnows", swallowing them whole when he could catch them.