Once we returned to Juneau, it was all go in preparation for the next stage of the trip. In addition to getting perishables for the coming days, we restocked the freezer and picked up some other basic supplies, since Juneau has a Costco and several large grocery stores. It took two dock trolleys to get everything down to the boat!
As you can see, it was nice and sunny in Juneau - with temperatures in the 80s, it almost felt too hot.
Before we left Statter Harbor, we filled up with water, gasoline, and heating fuel. We will be going from Juneau to Glacier Bay then down the outside of Chichagof Island to Sitka, and we don’t want to have to stop at the ranger station or any of the villages for fuel (we’re still reeling from the $8+/gal fuel at Kake), so we filled up both of the spare fuel bladders. We also filled up the water bladder to test that out.
As you can imagine, it makes the boat pretty back heavy, and the water bladder takes up a big chunk of the deck. If it gets in the way too much, we may scrap the idea of carrying extra water until we can work out an under-deck solution.
It is great to be back in the boat, and I’m excited to get away from civilization again. We threaded through a gauntlet of whale watching boats hovering around some humpbacks on our way through Saginaw Channel, and I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for the people for whom this would be their only whale viewing experience.
We’re making our way slowly to Glacier Bay, and we will be poised to enter first thing on the day our permit starts. After being spoiled by all our fjord-hopping, Couverden Island Cove‘s outlook isn’t anything spectacular; but it is sheltered with great holding, there’s not much sign of human development, and there’s plenty of room for us and the two other boats here tonight.
We went for a dinghy ride this evening and found that the charts are amazingly wrong again. Perhaps since the last survey there was an earthquake or something here to uplift the sea floor - there is actually land across an area that the charts show as being open water. At the beach where we got out, we saw several big boulders that looked out of place - there were no cliffs for them to have rolled off of - so they must be glacial erratics.
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