Post by Paul
We made our way to Hoonah to catch Koal on his last night. It was perfect timing and we were so glad to see him. True Koal-style he surprised us on the dock by posing initially as the boat owner next to us in full foulies, until he turned around.
While Koal put their boat to bed for the season, we took showers, did laundry and explored Hoonah a bit and were able to see a beautiful totem pole being carved to commemorate indigenous soldiers complete with a rifle woven into the design. Later we had a delightful long evening with Koal and his boss Shayar. They have been fishing for Dungeness crab all summer.
The next morning, with 5 pounds of Halibut from Shayar in our icebox, we headed out into Icy Straits to thread our way down a number of passes and straits towards home. This is where it gets tricky- some of these straits are so long that you cannot get through them without encountering ebb and flood currents at either end. That means you will have current moving against you at some point. More on that a little later but our simple strategy was to start with an opposing current and end with current in our favor.
Our first anchorage after Hoonah was Pavlof Harbor. We traveled through Icy Straits and the north end of Chatham Straits. Both have currents, but Chatham Strait presented the largest challenge with currents up to 1.6 knots. At this point you are probably thinking exactly what we were thinking. As in “that’s not a lot of current to be concerned about” and that is true. However Chatham strait is very long and aligned south-southwest with a width of about 3 miles. Any weather in the Pacific that has winds blowing up the strait will dramatically change sea state. So a small current with surface winds (with rain, lots of rain) can build a short and steep chop. If you happen to get your timing off conditions can slow you down considerably. In our case we had the timing correct but conditions still worked against us in both the Icy Straits and Chatham Strait to slow us down by a couple hours. A ‘short day’ became a long day. The reward for this are porpoises and humpback whales along the way, plus an amazing anchorage.
Pavlof Harbor is not a harbor. It is a small bay with a fairly large river flowing into it. In the past there was a cannery there, thus the “harbor” title. It also provided significant protection from most conditions. Other than the industrial remnants which added interest, Pavlof seemed largely pristine. The river with a significant waterfall at its head, had thousands of leaping salmon running up to their spawning grounds.
We tied our dinghy to the shore and made our way upstream towards the waterfall. The banks were trampled and littered with salmon carcasses. We sat and watched brown bears fishing a short 300 feet away.
The star of this spectacular show was an enormous and beautiful brown bear and her three cubs. The river became a little crowded when another female brown bear and her cub joined at the river bank. And then another mama and baby. Bears kept emerging from the far shore and we were amazed how such large animals could fade in and out of the woods before our eyes. The bears all kept their distance from each other with the mother of the 3 cubs clearly being the largest and dominant force with the best fishing spots. The mothers seemed mostly sated ( and a bit bored?) and left their catch for the babies. We could see the long strips of scarlet flesh as they ripped them off. The cubs worked on imitating their mothers, chasing salmon and sometime getting close but having no clue how to finish the catch!
One cub definitely didn’t want to get wet and kept up a pathetic whine from the shore before finally entering rhe river and then immediately standing up with its front paws on its mother’s back. The mother wanted none of it, shaking her body to throw off the cub. There was other wildlife, mostly seagulls, cleaning up after the bears. We have come to realise in our short immersion in bear country that a river mouth plus clusters of seagulls ( highly visible as white dots on the distant shores) means a high likelihood of bears.
The mothers were uneasy the whole time but not with us who they ignored us completely. There was something in the Sitka spruce and hemlock woods that flank the river- especially on the east side of the river- our side. Perhaps a large male? They are known to kill cubs. We kept nervously checking the woods near us. Our thoughts were anything that makes a grizzly nervous is something we really don’t want to encounter.
With the tide coming in and rising several feet in less than an hour, and having had to rescue our dinghy already from escaping ( mad dash down the shore then wading waist high in glacial melt water just in the nick of time as it floated away) we decided to head back to Tomten. We loved this place so much we decided to stay an extra day.
Our next ‘short’ passage was from Pavlof Harbor to Appleton Cove via Chatham And Peril Straits. (Lovely name!) We got the current perfectly right and the weather was on our side, until we got to Peril Straits where we entered into a white out fog bank. We love our radr especially at times like this! On the way navigated through several groups of humpback whales and fishing boats working along the shoreline. We arrived early afternoon in Appleton Cove. It has a very narrow entrance – without local knowledge the entry was somewhat nerve racking. We dropped anchor in the center of a small basin and took the time explore a little ashore where there was a rustic forest service cabin available to people to rent. The doors were unlicked and we investigated but as we were in a dense thicket if salmonberries we didn’t stay long. We also saw a pair of redheaded elegant Sandhill cranes walking the shoreline.
We were grateful for the gift of our surroundings and since the weather turned to rain again, we stopped exploring and we barbecued the halibut and ate like royals. The halibut was amazing.
Sailing Tomten 